Formatting changes on importation

[detritus books]

I just placed a .docx into InDesign, and a ton of the formatting came out wrong. A bunch of the text has changed to either BOLD or BOLD ITALIC. Is there any way to fix this without going through the entire 118,000 words and fixing all the instances manually?

[Derek Cross]

Have a look at this comprehensive online video training course (you can get 30 days free):

Word and InDesign: Integration

[Cari Jansen]

You could Find/Change to locate specific formatting in text and change it, and even apply different paragraph/character styles to text this way if needed.

1. Choose Edit > Find/Change
2. Click More Options to see the full Find/Change dialog box
3. Leave the Find what and Change to fields empty and click on the Specify attributes to find icon.
   
4. In the Find Format Settings dialog box, select the character formatting you want to search for in the text. For example a 'Bold' font style part of Basic Character Formats. Click OK. Click Done.
   
5. To change this formatting to something else, click Specify attributes to change icon, and similar to Find Format Settings, you can ow opt to apply a character or paragraph style, or change the character formatting to preferred settings. Click OK. Click Done.
   
   
6. Once you've set the Find/Change options, you can Change All occurrences across a Story, Document etc.
   

[Derek Cross]

If you select Shift, (whilst in InDesign) and then File > Place (Cmd + D) and select your Word document it will bring up the Microsoft Word Import Options dialogue box and from there you can select Preserve Styles and Formatting from Text and Tables, and other facilities, such as replacing Word styles with InDesign styles after a file has been placed.