This month we’ll jump about a little, starting by working with importing Microsoft Word text in Adobe InDesign. Then we’ll move on to email signature design. Probably very few people pay much attention to it, but perhaps we should as it’s the last visual impression of the sender that the reader will see. We’ll also look at Google Docs, compared to Microsoft Word. Obviously it lacks Word’s overload of features and functions but the fact that it’s freeware and flexible shows this is an option well worth taking a look at.
Q With so many attractive software options for self-publishing, I decided to take advantage of the Creative Cloud and subscribe to Adobe InDesign, which has been an enjoyable and interesting learning experience. However, I now need to know how to work faster as I have a lot of text to bring across from Microsoft Word. This is not the odd page, this is swathes of text that needs to be bought across, styled and then worked on in InDesign. What would be the best way to approach the task?
A If you have used styles already in the Word document, then you will find the job is not as daunting as you might imagine. InDesign contains the ability to import and map Word styles to InDesign styles across whole documents. This means you have control over incoming Word styles and at a later point will be able to edit/update them in InDesign itself.