Bold/italic text is one of the few parts of Microsoft Word styling that design­ers actu­ally lament the loss of when trans­fer­ring con­tent from Word into InDe­sign. Word styles are gen­er­ally poorly used/abused, and accord­ingly the default is to throw them all out when import­ing text. Here’s how to avoid los­ing the baby with the bathwater.

In InDe­sign, press ⌘+K (Ctrl + K) to bring up the Pref­er­ences dia­log, then click through to the last pane, “Clip­board Han­dling”. At the bot­tom of this pane, under “When Past­ing Text and Tables from Other Appli­ca­tions”, set Paste to “All Infor­ma­tion (Index Mark­ers, Swatches, Styles, etc.)

Some Word styling will now import — watch care­fully to make sure noth­ing too stu­pid finds its way into your pris­tine InDe­sign document!