Document text now linked to another document - how to remove?

Question

I admit I am new to InDesign and am learning through the proverbial firehose. I have been selecting, copying, and pasting content from one InDesign document into my current working document. Because the new document uses different Character and Paragraph Styles from the old one, I delete the ones that get copied over from the previous document and reassign all the copied text with the current ones. Up until now, this worked without problems. The last time I did this, somehow the imported content linked my current document to the old document I copied it from. So every time I try to modify it in the new document, even the smallest thing like deleting some text, it has to go back and open the old document before it can make the change in the new one. This really slows things down to practically being unusable. How can I break this link to the old document? Thanks! Phil

Answer 1

Hi Peter. I think I have a better understanding of what happened, although I'm not sure why it caused a problem. The best part is, I think I've found a workaround that stops the problem from happening. I had been working with all my InDesign files on a remote network drive, but was unhappy with the file transfer speed. So I copied the whole folder, with all the Documents, Books, Links, and everything, to a local hard drive and started working on them there. I think that is when the problem started happening.
After moving the files to my local drive, the file speed still seemed slow, but I didn't realize until this morning that even when I open the Book on the local drive, it is still pointing to all the documents on the network drive. I only realized this when I looked at the Documents on my local drive, and they were still earlier versions, all the updated documents were still on the network drive. So, suspecting that the problem had something to do with confusion of file locations, I did two things. First, I copied the whole folder AGAIN from the remote drive to my local drive. Then I opened the offending Document directly (not via the Book) and deleted the last section I had copied and pasted from the old Document. This seemed to cure the problem of it always looking for the old Document it was copied from. Then I deleted the Book itself, and am in the process of reconstructing it using all the Documents on the local hard drive folder.
This raises a few questions about the best way to work.
1) Is it better to edit individual documents of a Book by opening them from within the Book, or should I edit them individually, and then update the Book when I am all done? I'm starting to think the latter would give faster response, because the Book would not always have to update all the Documents with every change you make in one of them.
2) When I'm done with the Book, I then want to move the whole package (Book, Documents, Links, Fonts, etc.) to a network drive for access by other users. Will I need to delete and rebuild the Book after I have moved it to the network drive, since otherwise it would still be pointing to the Documents on my local drive? Or is there an easier way?
Also, if you can recommend a good reference with this kind of information, it would be much appreciated. I do have InDesign CS5 Classroom in a Book, but it doesn't have this kind of information.
Phil