Using Find/Change to Copy a Character or Paragraph Style to Multiple Documents

David Blatner

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You have 50 documents and you want to add the same character style (or paragraph style or object style) to each of them. There are several good ways to do this. (I’m assuming you’ve made the style in one of them first.)

• You could put all the documents in a book, set a master document, and use the Sync Book feature (which I talked about in this earlier article).
• You could select some text (or object) that has that style applied to it, copy it, and then paste it into each of the documents. When you paste text or an object, all the styles come with it. You can then delete the text or object and the styles remain.
• Or you could use Find/Change. Here’s how:

Let’s say you have a bunch of documents in which you have italic-styled text, but they don’t use a true italic character style (the formatting is just applied locally, as an override). Now you’ve created an “italic” character style in one of the documents and you want to apply it everywhere.

First, open a bunch of the documents, including the one that has the new style. (I don’t think I would open all 50 files… it should work, but having that many files open in InDesign at the same time would make me really nervous. I think perhaps 10 at a time is reasonable?)

Then open Edit > Find/Change and set up your search… you’re looking for any text that looks italic and you’re applying the italic character style. Because it’s any text, you leave Find What and Change to both blank:

Now here’s the trick: Set the Search pop-up menu in the Find/Change dialog box to “All Documents”.

No, that’s not “all documents on your hard drive and throughout the universe” — it just means “all open documents.”

So now, if you click Change All, it will find all text that is set to the font style italic and it will apply a character style to it… and for all the documents that don’t have that style already, it will add it, too!

Of course, if you have a document that doesn’t currently have any italic text in it, then this won’t add the style to that document.

By the way, I really wish InDesign could do Find/Change throughout a book (or even a folder of files) without having to force us to open the files. That would be cool.

Anyway, I have to admit that when I need the same style across a bunch of (already created) documents, I usually use the copy/paste option. It’s a “brute force” solution, but it goes pretty quickly (copy then open-paste-delete-save-close, open-paste-delete-save-close, etc). But this find/change feature can really come in handy if you have a ton of files to edit!