Word to InDesign Document File Formatting and Batch Automation

[infinitux]

Hi there.

I'm working on a document in indesign, and it's a very straight forward job. It's just a simple letter sized photocopy ready book. All the documents (a collection of other books) have been made previously in Microsoft Word, and are 1 to N pages, with basic Word Formatting(nothing complicated, just simple pictures and text). What I'm wondering, is how can I take a Word Document and Place it into an indesign project, so that the page layout of the word document will put page 1 to N as it appears in Word, into the indesign project?

When I just place the document into the indesign project, it puts all of the pages from one Microsoft Word(*.doc) file, into just one of the pages of the 1 to N pages in the indesign document.

Ideally I could find a way to sort out all the stories in the book by author, and catagorize all the stories by author into sections, and join them all together, into one large editable document, so that I can make graphical enhancements.

Are there any good automation/batch features, that will let me do large amounts of work at once using some sort of special plugins? I'd like to be able to stuff like: do all the paging formatting in one fail swoop, do all the graphics effects in one fail swoop, and get it all ready for print in one fail swoop.

If I can find a way to break up the parts of the book for proper organization that would be very awesome too.

The absolute fastest ways I can get this document ready to send to cue would be ideal.

I'm using InDesign on an Apple Mac Mini with pretty decent processing ability.

 

[eugenetyson]

Have you got page breaks in your word doc?

When you place the file, on the place dialog box there is a show import options. Click that.

Then when you got to import you have a host of options.

Select Preserve Page Breaks.

When you place the file it will fill the container.

Add a new page

and click the red overflow box on the bottom corner of the previous page

and then click on the new page at the top left hand corner of the margin holding down shift.