Best Practices for Placing Microsoft Word (doc or docx) Files?

Question

What is the best way to place Word files into InDesign CS3?
Every time I place a Word file into InDesign, ID applies unwanted character styles and paragraph overrides to all of my text. For example, if I place a Word document with "Pal-Body" as the paragraph style, ID places the text with the *character* style "Pal-Bold" applied to all of the text, and ID applies an override to all of the paragraphs to remove the bold.
Essentially, the text almost looks correct since the paragraph override undoes the bold caused by the unwanted character style. But "almost correct" is not good enough, so I have to manually remove the override, remove the character styles, and reapply any character styles to the text that are supposed to be there.
This happens regardless of whether I select "Use InDesign Style Definition" or map the styles from Word to InDesign.
By the way, my styles in Word are exactly the same as InDesign. I saved my InDesign template as an RTF file, and then saved that as a DOT Word Template.
Also, I didn't seem to have this problem with InDesign CS2.
What is going on and how do I fix it?

Answer 1

There are a bunch of reasons why you might get paragraph overrides on imported text. In my case, it's because Word appends styling information for all complex & Asian text to my styles exported from ID. When I place the revised (or translated) RTF, I get paragraph overrides. I just clear 'em all at once. It almost always snaps back to the specs I set in my original ID doc.
Every once in a while, I'll get some Normal or some auto-named Word style gibberish in my ID doc; it's usually faster to go and fix the styling in Word and re-import than it is to try to fix it in ID.
What happens when you select all text and clear all overrides? If you don't get what you want, then probably new style info is being auto-generated while you work in Word. To test this: Export your RTF, and then place it again without opening it up in Word. If you don't find any paragraph overrides when you do this, then you can assume that the way you're working in Word is causing this. When I roundtrip through Word in this way, I always examine my styling before saving and placing, and there's always something to fix.
Also, you don't want "Available Styles" you want "Formatting in use." It's a dropdown at the bottom of the sidebar in Word. That will hide "Normal," if that style does not appear in your doc.