Unlinking text/Word documents from InDesign

Problem: you have a linked text document with the original source missing. InDesign (CS5) won’t allow you to unlink it, even though there’s usually a command to do so. If you try to relink to a different file, InDesign crashes.

Workaround: select one of the missing files in the Links palette and choose Go To Link. Select all the text and cut it to the clipboard. Set the frame’s content type to Unassigned (Object > Content). The missing link will disappear from the Links palette. Now change the frame’s type back to Text and paste in the text you’d copied to the clipboard.

Aside 1: if you create a document with the filename and path that InDesign is expecting, it will show the exclaimation mark beside the file and you can update to the new content, as usual. Once you’ve done this the option to unlink will come back, but by that time it’s too late: you’ll be looking at the content of the new document you created.

Aside 2: saving the document as IDML then opening that, thus forcing InDesign to recreate an INDD file, doesn’t help. Editing the /META-INF/metadata.xml file inside the IDML package would allow you to remove references to the linked text documents, but I don’t have a text editor to allow me to do this (TextWrangler lets you get inside the IDML package but not to save any changes), so it may not work – and the conversion from IDML back to INDD may cause other problems anyway.