Create perfect Word documents from InDesign

Sep 27, '06 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: dashard

I was redesigning my resume to make it more attractive, and decided to do the job in InDesign (CS2), since it offered greater control and finesse. Almost immediately upon completing my masterpiece, I started kicking myself. As anyone who does the online job boards knows, MS Word is the de-facto format of choice, and I really had to reformat the entire thing for Word if I wasn't going to upset all the Hiring Managers with PDFs.

So I fired up Word (2004) and was about to begin recreating the entire layout there when ... I tried it. I switched back and copied my resume from InDesign. Switched back to Word. Hit Command-V to paste the clipboard. Holy Toledo, Batman. It was all there: font choices (including styles), justifications, tabs and margins, hanging indents with tabs in place. When I tell you it came in perfectly, I mean perfectly. Even the line breaks were the same!

The only thing that didn't transfer perfectly was the rules under and over that I'd placed on my section headers, but only because the stroke widths weren't correct (I think they defaulted to a 1pt rule.)

But check this out: take a trip over to the Styles Palette and they're all there. Every style that I'd specified in InDesign -- both Paragraph as well as Character styles -- transfered over to Word (including some extras that Word must have read as styles, but no harm done.) I simply fixed the Word style for my section headers to the proper stroke widths and, voila!, instant transfer.

For all of you InDesign jockeys who would prefer to use its tools to create more advanced PDFs, but still may need a Word version of your document, I humbly submit this hint. Bon Appetit!

[robg adds: I don't have InDesign, so this one is untested.]

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