From the course: InDesign 2025 Essential Training

Importing text - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2025 Essential Training

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Importing text

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- [Instructor] Okay, let's say you have a text file, such as this Word document, and you need to get it into InDesign. Now, the easiest method is just to select some text and copy and paste it. And while that does sometimes work fine, especially for small amounts of simple, unformatted text, I really do not recommend it for anything more than a paragraph or two. And I certainly wouldn't use copy and paste for any text that was formatted or included foreign language or special characters. I've just seen too many problems over the years with text showing up totally wrong after pasting it. Instead, I strongly recommend that you save this as a Word document and then use the Place command in InDesign. It is far more reliable. Let me show you. I'm going to switch back to InDesign, and I'll go up to the File menu and chose Place. Or you could type cmd + d or ctrl + d on Windows. Up comes the Place dialogue box, and I'm going to choose this file here. It's a regular Microsoft Word document. But this could be an RTF file or even a text file. Then, I'll click Open. Because I had no frame selected on my page, InDesign loads the place cursor with that story. If I did have an empty text frame selected, then the story would've gone right into it. But in this case, there's no frame yet, so to place this story inside my InDesign document, I'm going to move my cursor up to the left corner of these margins. I'm looking for a subtle, but important, change. That tiny black arrow inside the cursor turned to a white arrow. You may have to squint to see it, but it's there. And that tiny white arrow means that when I click, it's going to snap to the margin guides. So I'm going to get as close as I can to those guides, but I don't need to worry about placing it exactly right. Now, I'll click and InDesign makes a text frame and flows the text into it. I should point out that after you place or paste text into InDesign, you may see a little gray box with a letter T appear in the lower right corner of the text frame. This is part of InDesign's Auto Style feature. InDesign is trying to be helpful, but don't click on it, or else it's going to remove all of your text formatting and try to apply its own styles based on some artificial intelligence. And the results are, well, they're not pretty. So if you see that little gray box with a T, just ignore it. Now, I just got one full frame of text. And if I come up here into the dock and open my Pages panel, you can see that page here. That's page seven, the last page of the document. However, I happen to know that this is a much longer story. This should've filled multiple pages. I really wish I could import the entire document at once, and fortunately, you can. Let me show you how. I'm going to undo that with a cmd + z or a ctrl + z on Windows, and that reloads the place cursor for me. Now, you can place this text file again, but with a modifier key. Hold down the shift key. When you press the shift key, the cursor changes a little bit. You get this kind of S-shaped arrow in there, and that indicates that when I click, it's going to flow all the text. So once again, I'll move that cursor to the upper left corner of the margins, and I still have the shift key held down. And now, I click. This time, InDesign not only imports just that one page, but the whole text story. And it created a bunch of pages for me. And on each of those pages, it created a new text frame, and then it threaded the text from one page to the next automatically. So that shift key modifier is really important when you're importing a long story. Okay, there's one more thing I need to point out. Let's jump to the next spread over here. Look at the formatting in here. It looks much nicer than it did in my word processing program, right? Let me go back to Word and show you. See, here in Word, the formatting is very simple, which makes it easy to edit. But it's not very pretty. Back here in InDesign, it looks different. How did that happen? Well, I'm going to be talking about paragraph styles and character styles in a later chapter, but I do want to point out now that, if the styles are named exactly the same between Word and InDesign, then InDesign will throw away the original boring formatting and instead, it'll use the formatting that's defined in InDesign. Now, if I look over here in the dock and open the Paragraph Styles panel, you'll see that I have a bunch of paragraph styles in this InDesign document. And they're named exactly the same as they were in Word. Now, a moment ago, I mentioned something about threading, the fact that this story over here threads to this frame over here. What's that about? How can you manually thread stories from one text frame to another? Well, that's what I'm going to cover in the next movie.

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