From the course: InDesign Secrets

303 Import a style with Find/Change - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

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303 Import a style with Find/Change

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- [Instructor] When you're working in an InDesign layout to which you have applied styles, which I have in this document, and you want to bring in styles that you have created already in another document, you probably already know of two ways to do that, and I'll review those two ways, but I'm also going to show you a neat third way. That's what this video is all about, so let's just take a look at our documents really quickly. Here is a boring corporate document, and here is an exciting cookbook with other styles in it as well. Now the two ways that you might want to bring styles over are first of all you go to the Paragraph Styles panel menu of the receiving document, the one that you're working on now, and choose Load Paragraph Styles, or Load All Text Styles to get the character styles. Navigate on your hard drive for the source document, the one with the other styles that you want to pull from. Click Open, and then choose the styles that you want to bring over by turning on their checkboxes here in this Load Styles dialog box that lists all of them, and this is a fantastic feature, great especially if you want to bring over many styles. But we're not going to do that this time. The other way that you probably know of is by cutting and pasting. Let's switch to normal view for both documents. Let's say for example in the cookbook, I'd like to bring over the ingredient bullets, all right? I want to bring over this style, which is Ingredients. You can copy and paste, so you just copy any text from the source document that has that style applied to it. Copy, come over here to your receiving document, paste it someplace, and it gets added to your Paragraph Styles panel menu, but that's the boring way. Let's do the fun third way, and that is with Find/Change, which is amazing. I didn't know that you could move styles from one document to another with Find/Change, until my friend Tina Henderson wrote it up for our blog, InDesign Secrets. So I am grabbing her tip, and thank you Tina. Here's how it works. You go to your source document, and you find a style that you want to bring over. Let's say for example I would like my headline in that corporate document looking like this, and in this document, this style is called head. You go to Find/Change in the source document, with Command or Control + F, or from the Edit menu, and in Change Format, you choose the style, you can see I was playing with this already, that you want to bring over. In this case, head, okay? You don't need to put anything into Find what or Change to. Right now there's just a space character in there, which is fine. Keep Find/Change open, and then switch to the other document. Check that out, it does not leave this. It remembers this. I love that. Then in this document, you just click anywhere, but I usually click in a paragraph to which I want to apply the new style. Just helps me understand what's happening. And I click in the beginning because I'm just going to use that space character. You have to enter something in Find what, or you can enter something in Find Format in order for InDesign to actually do the Find/Change. If you didn't have anything, I just deleted that space, you'll see these are all dimmed, so you have to put something in Find what, and what you're telling InDesign now is find a space, and change the format of it to this paragraph style. So you only want to do this once of course, you don't want to do this to all the spaces in your document. Don't choose Change All, choose Find Next. It finds the first space, which because I clicked in this paragraph, happens to be in the paragraph, and then choose Change, and it applied that style, and it brought it in, let's click done, to my Paragraph Styles panel menu. Now you might be wondering, why is this gray here? That's because in this document, if I right-click on head, and choose Edit head, head is based on Body, and the body is gray here. That's all, so you have to be careful about based on styles, but that would happen with any way that you're bringing styles over. But I just love how it saves a step when you want to just bring one style from a source document to your target document. Try it next time, use Find/Change.

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