I found an even easier way to do this.

Create a Paragraph Style for the headings that you want to start in a new frame. In “Paragraph Style Options”, the dialog box that opens when you double click on a paragraph style name, navigate to the “Keep options” tab.

At the bottom of this tab there are several options for “Start paragraph”. Choose “In next Frame”. It is that easy!

Having given it more thought, perhaps the simplest thing would be to find a way to have the text move to the next text frame every time a certain condition is met. Or to have some paragraph styles begin new text frames.

Is there a way to do that?

Hi Graham,

I have put together basic idea of what I am trying to do: https://www.dropbox.com/s/nov4h8kd6waf524/Screenshot%202018-06-08%2012.14.55.png?dl=0

Basically, I have a single Word document. When I bring it into InDesign I would like the title to go into the text frame for the title. I would like the various next sections of the file to go into the appropriate next text frames, complete with appropriate formatting. Designer name into the designer name frame. The next section would be a description that would need to go into another text frame. Then a materials list would go into the next text frame, and so on.

I would like the template in InDesign to self populate with the text. As I said above, data merge seems to be the simplest solution except that the files will always be in Word (not in a database or spreadsheet). A more important limitation is that many of the “fields” would have multiple paragraphs and as far as I understand, data merge cannot handle that.

Does this make my inquiry more clear?

Thank you.