Importing a Word document with least amount of formatting hassles

And after you clean up your WORD document - save as RTF and then import - instead of doc(x/m). 

https://www.adobescripts.com/uploads/WordStyle.zip

This will convert - in WORD - all combinations of Sub-/Super- Script, Bold, Italic, Underline, AllCaps as local formatting - into CharStyles.

In case you're still not exactly clear on exactly what an override is, I made this little animation to show the precise difference between locally applied formatting overrides versus paragraph and character styles, and how to use the Style Override Highlighter to show where you have overrides. 

When I have a Word document that is full of local formatting, I like to clean it up. Sometimes that involves running a VBA in Word that looks for places where someone just clicked the little italic "i" button when they wanted an italic word, and replaces those with Word character styles with names like "ItalicOnly" and "BoldOnly." Sometimes I prefer a more nuke-it-from-orbit-it's-the-only-way-to-be-sure approach, and use pandoc to convert to Markdown, which leaves only raw text with some simple markup for bold and italic, which I can then convert to InCopy, which I can bring straight into the document with no overrides or Word cruft.

Besides all the best-practices Willi provide, you will want to enable the "Show Import Options" menu when you place a Word file. It's a checkbox at the bottom of the file list when you select the file to import/place. In there, you can carefully map all the incoming styles so that less cleanup is needed once in ID, and do other things.

But it really comes down to having as clean a Word file as you can get before you import it. Very much a GIGO operation, and Word tends to load up files with Garbage. About the only point Willi doesn't cover in depth is that it's a good idea to get rid of all spot/override formatting like Bold and Italic and replace them with defined character styles, the way InDesign does it. (Create the character styles in Word, then use Search and Replace to replace the spot format with the defined one.)

It's also a good idea to clean out the garbage before you import. As a last step, use Save As to write the Word file under a new name, and this will purge a ton of dead material (mostly undo info) and make the file smaller and cleaner. Some prefer to save to .doc format for import, over .docx; others like to save to .rtf instead. I've had good luck with all three as long as the Word doc isn't too complex and is "clean" according to all these rules.

The complete opposite of this is to get a file from some unskilled user and try to import it without taking any preparatory steps. The result is almost always a steaming pile of GIGO. 🙂

1. Every formatting must be done in Word with Paragraph and Character styles.
2. Multiple returns are not allowed to force space between lines.
3. No manual formatting without styles (that is overriding).
4. No hyphenation in Word, neither with automatic, nor with the hyphen and never with dashes.
5. Import in InDesign with options, and target the Word Styles to InDesign styles.
6. Don't bother about the appearance in Word, the structure is important, the function of a style.
7. Work in text in Word with norma text, don't CAPITALIZE, that must be done later with styles in InDesign.
8. Don't use page and column break in Word, use styles to do that.
9. Avoid forced line breaks as much as you can.
10. Avoid multiple spaces in a raw, use tabulators instead, in InDesign you can use spaces with a fixed width, which are not avalable in Word.
11. Avoid using Word images in InDesign (EMF, WMF, PNG), replace them with quality graphic formats.

Even if you work clean, at the end you have to remove overrides.