Mike's covered the basics, but an additional workflow/practice comment: If you are going to be cutting and pasting a lot of Word content from various sources, you will want to develop a consistent, meticulous workflow lest your project document end up cluttered with paste-in styles. It's unbelieveable how fast the junk from most (sloppy) Word docs can pile up, in Paragraph Styles, Character Styles and color swatches alone.
If the pieces are small, it may be most efficient to paste them in without ANY formatting attached, and quickly apply the ID document styles.
If the pieces are large, it may be most efficient to paste them into a work document with the same styles as the project document, clean it all up there, then cut and paste the result into your working doc. You can just abandon changes to the interim doc to keep it from getting too polluted.
And if you will be cutting material from the same sources, work to either set up matching ID styles or get the Word authors to use consistent styles and names to minimize the conflicts.
Also, as I always suggest as well, use a Word stage to clean up the text itself — spell check, remove all multiple white spaces (especially multiple spaces or tabs, or tab-spaces, and paragraph-space / space-paragraph combos)... this will reduce the number of layout headaches.
Word to ID is best done well, not fast. A few minutes getting a clean paste into ID will pay off in both the immediate and long run. You never want to depend on fixing everything up at some later step in ID.
╟ Word & InDesign to Kindle & EPUB: a Guide to Pro Results (Amazon) ╢
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