How do I use a document more than once in a book in inDesign CS6?

Question

When setting the page ordering of a book in inDesign, I am having trouble figuring out how to have the same document show up twice. I am creating a business book that has the same forms appearing multiple times. How do i duplicate those documents?

When I attempt to add them again, I get the message "'filename.indd' can't be added to the book. The document is already part of the book."

What do I do?

Answer 1

Indesign doesn't really have the capacity to gather elements and create multiple versions of the same book. This is what Adobe Framemaker does. It takes pieces and combines them into a working manual/book. Framemaker also allows you to use the pieces in several Framemaker documents.

If you aren't interested in Frammaker, or don't have this need on a regular basis. Then Lauren's comment about simply duplicating the original file and using that, is appropriate. Indesign locks pieces into its "books". If you need the same piece in multiple books, you need to duplicate the piece. This can create problems when edits are needed.

Perhaps a better option using Indesign is to create a new document, the same size and page count as filename2.indd. Lets call this new document NEW.indd. Then use File > Place to place all the pages of filename2.indd into the NEW.indd document. What this does is merely create uneditable representations of the indesign pages. So... if you subsequently update or edit filename2.indd you can then open NEW.indd and update the links. This is generally much easier than trying to apply the same edits to multiple documents.