When you place styled content from Microsoft Word into InDesign, the paragraph and character styles from the Word document appear with symbols in the styles panels. The symbols certainly don’t do any harm, but they can be annoying to look at.
You can get rid of them by opening the Paragraph Style Options dialog box and making a change to any of the style options. That’s easy enough to do once, but it quickly gets tiresome when you have lots of imported styles.
Thankfully, now you can get rid of them all at once easily with the help of a free script from Peter Kahrel.
The script works by exporting the document to IDML and creating a new INDD file with “_fixed” added to the file name. The original document is untouched.
Read more about the script and download it here.
Thanks, Peter!
This article was last modified on February 18, 2026
This article was first published on February 18, 2026
Commenting is easier and faster when you're logged in!
Recommended for you
Import Word Documents, Edit in Word and InDesign, and Keep Linked for Updating
If you work with Word documents, you want this. Now.
InDesign 101: Character Styles
Learn the right way to control text formatting at the character level in InDesig...
Create Space Around a List in InDesign
Add extra space around a list, without creating multiple paragraph styles!