WordsFlow

The WordsFlow story

If you’re a visual learner, before we get into the full story, here’s a 4 minute walkthrough demonstrating the basics of WordsFlow.

Go “live” with Word/Excel

With WordsFlow, you place Word documents and Excel spreadsheets as InDesign story contents with File > WordsFlow > Place with WordsFlow, using a familiar Place-like dialog.

But, behind the scenes, WordsFlow maintains a “live” dynamic link so it can intelligently merge external document changes into the InDesign story contents on each link update, rather than just replacing the story and losing all your work.

So you can format, layout, and edit in InDesign, while your authors and editors continue creating and editing story content in Word and Excel, all without ever losing your work on updates. Your authors and editors are no longer “frozen out” once layout begins.

When using Word documents (not Excel), WordsFlow creates a two-way link so you can push your InDesign story changes back to Word format to provide your authors and editors with the latest content.

Your biggest headache?

If you use InDesign for production, you already know the pain point: an author sends you a story via email or file-sharing, and you’ve placed it in your InDesign publication, fixing typos, changing formatting, editing content as needed, etc.

Then, the author or your editor sends you another version of the file, and expects you to figure out what changed, and weave those changes into what you hoped was the final story.

In the past, you might bite your tongue and simply re-place the story, losing all your hard work, then go through and manually make all the same changes you made before, hoping you’re not forgetting something (and likely losing that bet).

Or, if you’re more sophisticated, you might use a file-difference utility or PDF markup, going through each change, manually editing the InDesign story to match, and scratching your head a lot. In either case, you end up wasting a lot of time in a highly error-prone process.

End the headache

When you place the original Word or Excel file (or any text file), WordsFlow asks InDesign to keep a special kind of dynamic link to the file.

When you or anyone else makes to changes to that file (locally or in a shared-file situation), InDesign will notice that the link’s source has changed, and change the link’s status to “modified” in the Links panel (a yellow alert icon, as shown here).

You can update the story when you’re ready, using the normal link-update invocations, such as a double-click on the modified icon, or selecting the Links panel menu item Update Link.

As the link update starts, WordsFlow kicks in. Instead of letting InDesign replace the linked story wholesale and losing all your work, it applies a complex algorithm behind the scenes to merge the changes made to the external document since the last update into the current InDesign story contents (and to detect any conflicts).

We call this the “magic merge-update,” since it seems like magic the first times you see it working. It’s this magic that frees you from endless error-prone manual merging.

Nothing to learn

With WordsFlow building on the standard file linking mechanisms you already know, there are no learning pains.

And there is no barrier to using WordsFlow—just install the plug-in, select Place with WordsFlow and proceed using the normal place dialog.

Your collaborators don’t need any special software, and can continue to work exactly as they always have. But now their last-minute or even ongoing changes won’t slow you down.

Two-way with Word

WordsFlow has two features that give you a fully two-way workflow with Word. You can push updates from any InDesign story to its linked Word document using File > WordsFlow > Update Linked Document. This way, you can keep your collaborators working with the latest InDesign content, in their own editing environment.

Additionally, WordsFlow can export original InDesign story content in Word .docx format, auto-linking to the result, using File > WordsFlow > Export with WordsFlow… So you can now take existing InDesign content—however it was produced—and push it out in Word format for further editing and revision, to be shared with your collaborators.

As they make additions and changes to the exported document, you can pull in those changes with a normal WordsFlow story link update—usually with just a double-click.

One-way with Excel

WordsFlow also works one-way with imported Excel spreadsheet files as well as Word files, since imported Excel sheets just turn into tables in InDesign. (We do continue to “piggy-back” on the Adobe Excel import filter for this feature.)

You can place a spreadsheet file as a story, then format columns/rows or individual cells, etc. in InDesign. Later, if you or someone else makes changes to the original spreadsheet, including editing cells, or moving around rows or columns, etc., WordsFlow will figure out what changed, and merge in the changes without losing the formatting and edits you’ve made in InDesign.

WordsFlow doesn’t support two-way workflow with Excel documents, since maintaining spreadsheet content in InDesign is nigh impossible. But we call it a “one and a half-way workflow,” since you can still work on both sides simultaneously.

New workflows

WordsFlow not only ends last-minute just-one-more-little-update kinds of headaches, it enables entirely new and powerful workflows.

You can now have authors maintaining their story content in Word, with the layout and production people keeping story links to the shared Word files in InDesign (or getting new copies and relinking to them). When authors make changes to the source files, the production folks can merge-update the WordsFlow-based links to bring in the changes.

That way, authors can stay working in their comfort zone, using Word and Excel, and production can maintain the overall document in InDesign, without worrying about hand-merging in the changes that happen over time.

For examples of other new workflows, think of a newspaper or magazine on deadline dealing with fast-breaking story updates. WordsFlow is the ultimate solution for last-minute changes before going to press.

Or, on a longer time frame, imagine a corporate or educational publication with multiple departments updating their respective sections regularly, or a quarterly financial prospectus assembling reports from various departments. The InDesign production folk can keep links to the multiple source files that comprise the whole publication, and the various departments can keep their work updated in Word. When go-to-press happens, the production folk can merge-update all the links after a “last call” for changes.

For a concrete example, see Laurie Ruhlin’s description of how she uses WordsFlow with clients—letting them maintain content control throughout the publishing process—in the WordsFlow reviews.

After the fact

If you’ve already placed and formatted a Word document without WordsFlow, and are presented with an updated Word document that threatens a massive amount of manual change merging, WordsFlow can still save the day.

With WordsFlow installed, use Link to Original, selecting the Word document that you originally placed before doing all the work in InDesign. Then, relink to the updated Word document, and, presto! the updated Word document changes are merged and all your editing and formatting work is saved.

Update/merge conflicts

Generally, if there are conflicts with content and formatting, the InDesign side “wins” for formatting, and the external document side “wins” for content.

But if there are real conflicts in content (e.g., both sides changing the same word or phrase), WordsFlow will leave InDesign story Notes at each conflict point, which you can review after an update and decide how to handle.

Importantly, right after you update a WordsFlow link, you can open the InDesign Story Editor to see what changed on both sides: the changes you’ve made since the document was placed or last updated, and the changes the author/editor made in the document. (Including any conflict notes.)

Best-in-class Word support

At some point, the built-in Adobe Word (.docx) import filter on which we “piggy-backed” became too much of a liability (too many bugs and instabilities that were making our customers unhappy and also making us look bad), so we developed our own much more robust .docx import filter.

And, of course, we had to develop our own .docx export filter for our two-way workflow since nothing like it existed.

Now that we have complete control over the whole import/export process, WordsFlow provides a much more stable and maintainable platform for your work with Word.

WordsFlow vs InCopy?

If you’re wondering how WordsFlow fares vs Adobe InCopy, they’re fairly different beasts. InCopy clearly wins for editing-to-fit.

But there are enough advantages to WordsFlow that we’ve written a separate comparison.