Adobe InDesign CC - Word and InDesign

Using Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign together is possible and can be an important part of your workflow. There are fundamental differences in how Word and InDesign function. Word is a word processor at its core. It has all the features you need to create elegant as well professional documents comprising mainly of continuous text. InDesign is a page layout program, which can also process text. The primary function of InDesign is to layout page elements and have better control over your document.

Of course, you do not normally use InDesign to write letters or essays and the users normally juggle between these two programs. Understanding these two programs begin with knowing how they handle text.

Word has paragraph and character styles as well which you can find in the Styles panel in the Home tab on the Office ribbon. By default, all formatting in the text apart from headings and titles, goes into the Normal style.

In InDesign as we have been seeing till now, each text frame or even parts of the text by default is grouped under the Basic Paragraph style. However, this offers a lot of customizations and font options that is not normally dealt in Word. Knowing this difference is important when you want to import text formatted with Word styles into InDesign.

You should also remember that in Word, you directly work with text in a blank document but in InDesign everything happens in frames. You cannot just type directly on a blank document without creating a text frame.

Another point to be aware of is, the color scheme used in Word is RGB, while in InDesign it can be either RGB or CMYK depending on the intent of the document.