Placing Word file, Preserving Formatting causing overset issue due to tables!

Importing a Word doc can be simple and straightforward or a complete mess. It sounds as if you have a fairly complex document, so the simple methods are limited to what you've already tried: import with no styles and reformat it in ID.

To be honest, that may be your best approach. Either create a PDF from Word or keep the Word doc open as a guide/template, and format the ID doc to match. It really can be easier and faster to do it that way.

The other way is to import the doc with everything intact and clean up each of the doc styles, then delete the work content and place the Word doc in the new ID template. It should import pretty cleanly, needing only touch-up.

But as most Word docs are abysmally constructed, with loose application of styles and tons of override formatting... starting in ID with a clean if plain doc and reformatting it correctly might be the shortest path to completion. The alternative is to patiently reconstruct all those styles, then strip the Word doc of crud like double returns and double spaces and generated styles... and while that might seem like the right path, it can take many times longer.

In any case, do strip the Word doc of double spaces, double paragraph returns, soft paragraph returns and pretty much all double whitespace (tab-space, return-space, space-return, and the more obvious ones like multiple spaces or returns). All of those can make it much harder to get a clean format in ID.

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Either create other styles in Word, better do it in InDesign. Better is to create in InDesign all styles from the scratch and map them with import.