(upbeat music)
- [Anne Marie] You're an InDesign user,
you've laid out a beautiful document
for your client and exported it to PDF,
maybe even sent it to print.
Like for example, this employee manual.
You give it to them and they say,
"You know what? We love it.
But we need an editable version in Microsoft Word.
Can you do that for us?"
If you have not been at the receiving end
of that request, get ready
'cause it will come soon one day,
and you know, can you blame them?
A lot of users want to be able to edit
the beautiful things that you create for them in Word.
They think Word is for everything.
So maybe one day InDesign will allow you to export to Word.
It does not yet.
It allows you export text to Rich Text Format,
but it can't export everything toward,
like say, in this newsletter. City Cycling News.
Okay, so I'm going to show you here
how you can do it manually,
and then at the end of this video
I'm going to show you a couple commercial plugins
and a free service that you might want to consider.
Now, if your document is mainly text like this one,
then you are on Easy Street.
All you need to do is export it to PDF,
and export it from there to Word,
and I'll show you that in a second.
Now, if you have a document that's more highly designed,
with wraps and things and multiple frames per page,
you're going to take a little bit of tweaking
in the final result, but hopefully
your client will get that.
But both methods use the same thing.
Both methods, you export to PDF.
And then from Acrobat, you save out as Word.
So I've already exported both of these to PDF,
and I have them open in Acrobat.
Nothing special about the PDF format,
really, that you need to worry about.
Just have it open up in Acrobat.
So here's the Two Trees Manual, employee manual
and here's Cycling News.
Okay, looks exactly like in InDesign.
Let's do Two Trees Manual first.
to export to Word from Acrobat,
go to File, Export to Word.
Choose Word document, and then down here,
notice that there's a settings button.
Let me talk about that for a minute.
Your main thing is that do you want to
include flowing text or retain page layout?
You almost always want to choose retain flowing text.
You'd think maintain page layout,
but that can turn into a nightmare,
which I'll show you in a bit.
And then the other thing is
you usually do want to include images,
I would think, for your client,
to say "Yes, this is the exact same thing
that I did for you in InDesign,"
but you can choose not to include images.
I'm going to say retain flowing text, click Okay.
Now I have already done that,
exported to flowing text both of these,
so let's jump over to Word.
Here is Two Trees Manual as flowing text.
Looks pretty good, doesn't it?
Let me scale it back a bit so we can see more pages.
It looks really great, and in fact
even I think, I'm not sure what it did with the styles.
Some of the styles are still there.
Body text plus custom.
Now how the heck did that happen?
Well, this InDesign document was created from the start
from a Word file that was styled, and I'm guessing
that that information was retained when exported to PDF.
Let's take a look at the other document
which was Cycling News reflowable.
So here's Cycling News, a little bit more sketchy.
Let's zoom out a bit.
This wrap looks like it's working.
This one is not working.
All right, and this page something went blooey here.
I'm not quite sure.
Probably because we said reflowing.
If we look at it, let's open the document
where I said maintain the page layout.
Oh, this is the Two Trees Manual
maintain page layout, sorry.
This one, look at what's happening
when I click inside of a paragraph.
it has exported every paragraph
as a stand-alone text frame
that is anchored in the text flow.
Imagine if you had created your InDesign document
with one big text frame, and then every paragraph
was in its own text frame that you cut
and pasted into the big text frame.
That's how this is.
So that's why you usually don't want to do layout.
Let's take a look at what happens in Acrobat
if we export this guy as a Word document,
and we say that we want it to go to the desktop
and just change the settings to retain page layout
and click save.
You know, it's about the same.
Cycling is, it looks about the same.
Well, this page is a little better,
but if we click inside here,
every column is a separate frame.
And I don't even know if they're threaded.
I don't think so.
No, they're stand-alone.
So it's kind of a nightmare.
It's far better if it's mostly text, as you can see,
but that is the way that you would do it from InDesign
is you would export to PDF and then from Acrobat,
export it to Word.
Now there's a few different commercial services
you might want to check out.
Recosoft.com has a plugin called ID2Office
that has a free trial download.
You might want to try that.
I have not had excellent results from there,
but you do get more options
when you export to Word or PowerPoint.
Markzware has a product that purports to do
a better job of converting from PDF to InDesign
or illustrator, QuarkXPress, or Affinity for that matter.
I haven't tried that yet, but that could be cool.
And then there's a free service from NitroPDF.
You could just upload your PDF and say
that you want it as a Word file or any of these
and then they will email you the PDF,
ad that does a really nice job for free,
so that's pretty cool.
All right, now you know what's involved
If a client says, "I need to have a Word document
from your beautiful InDesign file."
You can do it.
(upbeat music)