How to import a Word document into a page layout

Import a .docx into Layout by Zaweba and the text arrives with its Word styles mapped to styles in your document, its tables and pictures anchored in the text where they belong, and its comments turned into notes. Use File > Import text if you want the story to stay linked to the Word file, so that when the writer sends a revised version, Update reads it again.

Most text for magazines, books and reports is written in Word, so getting it into the layout cleanly is one of the most common jobs there is. Doing it well saves hours of fixing formatting by hand.

Preparing the Word file

The cleaner the Word document, the cleaner the import. Ask writers to use Word's styles for headings and body text rather than making text bigger and bolder by hand. A heading styled as a heading in Word maps across to a heading style in Layout. A heading made from body text in bold just looks like body text in bold.

Ask for tables to be real Word tables, not text lined up with tabs, and for pictures to be supplied separately at full quality as well as placed in the document, because the picture inside a Word file has often been squashed.

Importing step by step

Set up your Layout document first: page size, margins, columns, parent pages and, most importantly, your paragraph and character styles. Word's styles are mapped to styles on the way in, so with your own styles ready, the writer's headings and body text land on the styles you designed rather than arriving as loose formatting.

Then import the .docx. The text flows into a frame, and from there you thread it through the document with the loaded cursor or let a primary text frame and smart text reflow add pages as the story grows. Tables come in as tables you can style with table and cell styles. Pictures come in anchored to their place in the text, so they move with it.

Comments from the writer or editor come in as notes. That keeps queries like "check this date" visible to whoever is laying out the page without them appearing in the printed text.

Keeping the link with the Word file

Type > Linked text, together with File > Import text, keeps the story linked to the file it came from. That works for Word as well as plain text, Markdown, RTF and HTML. If the Word file changes, or goes missing, live preflight shows it, and Update reads the text in again. This is handy when the writer is still revising while you design. It does mean that changes made in the layout to that story can be replaced by the next update, so decide at which point the text in the layout becomes the master and unlink it then.

Tidying up after import

Look through the story for leftover hand formatting. Clear overrides returns text to its style, which removes stray fonts and sizes the writer applied by hand. Find and change, including GREP, deals with double spaces, straight quotes that should be curly, and other repeated fixes in one pass. Layout's typographer's quotes follow the language of the text, so quotes come out right for English and many other languages.

The story editor shows the text plainly with style names, which makes it quick to spot a paragraph that picked up the wrong style.

Other ways to bring text in

Not everything arrives as Word. Plain text, RTF and Markdown import too, and a story can be exported back out as text if a writer needs it. For quick mock-ups before the copy exists, placeholder text fills a frame so you can design the page first.

Get the styles right before the first import and the rest follows. Once a template is set up, a new article can go from Word file to laid-out page in minutes rather than an afternoon.