Importing Word into InDesign, problem with styles

Question

OS 10.6, CS5
Hi everyone,
Does anyone have any experience with importing styled Word docs into InDesign?
Editors style their Word documents with some basic styles (Text, References, Headline, etc.) using a Word template that I created. Designers use import options to match the Word styles to the ID styles. This worked fine in Word 2004 and InDesign CS3: Word  "text" style would map on import to the InDesign "text" style, even though they had totally different attributes. Superscripts, italics, etc. would be respected as local overrides in InDesign.
Then we upgraded to CS5. Automatic mapping on import no longer seems to work: After importing text, all the styles in InDesign have local overrides assigned to them that don't make sense (hyphenation exceptions, tab settings). So I'm left with importing the Word styles, using auto-renaming so that InDesign explicitly does NOT match styles.
Then delete the Word styles one by one from the paragraph style panel, replacing with the desired ID style.
This has gone on for several months and we've now upgraded to Office 2011 but that hasn't solved the problem.
With Word 2011 docx files, the import works almost like it did in CS3, the styles almost come in cleanly: If the style in Word has NO local overrides, such as italics or superscripts, the InDesign style is correctly applied. The problem is those local overrides in Word--InDesign not only respects the italic or superscript, it also respects the font attribute. All the Word styles are Times New Roman so all superscripts in InDesign are coming in as superscript + TNR. (see screenshot)
Are we left with our original work-around? Importing styles then manually deleting and replacing them?
This is frustrating because it used to be smooth and seamless and while some new features of CS5 are great, it's annoying that it's broken this fundamental function!
I've tried saving the Word files as doc or rtf instead of docx but this doesn't make a difference in this problem.
Any help or advice would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

I'm an author / publisher.  I write in Word and I publish with InDesign. When I'm in the review stages, I like to edit my text in Word, so I export the text as an RTF.  When I import it back into InDeisgn I often find that some of the styles have annoying overrides from Word that break things.  (1) Paragraph style stuff about hyphenation and (2)  Characters style stuff about  Character direction: Left-to-Right style.
* Easy global  fix:  select the whole text open the Window | Style | Paragraph window, and click the button on the bottom to remove all overrides. And do the same for the Window | Style | Character window. Before doing this, I like to check that I don’t have any italics that are in the file as overrides rather than being in there as part of a header style or as part of the Emphasis style that I try to use throughout the text instead of just an italic override. It makes me uneasy to remove all overrides, as I always worry there might be an important one I could have kept.
* (1) Specific fix for the hyphenation overrides: Make sure the hyphenation settings in the individual InDesign paragraph styles match, so far as possible, the Word global hyphenation settings in the Page Layout | Hyphenation dialog of Word.    InDesign will import any Word hyphenation settings that don’t match the InDesign doc styles as overrides.
Specifically,  set InDesign Hyphen Limit to ( say) 1 and set Word | Hyphenation | Hyphenation Options | Limit consecutive hyphens to the same number (say) 1. Also set InDesign Paragraph Style Hyphenation | Hyphenation Zone to (say) 0.5” and set Word | Hyphenation | Hyphenation Options | Hyphenation Zone to the same number (say) 0.5”.  And turn off all the InDesign optional hyphenation check boxes at the bottom of the dialog, and the turn off the two check boxes in the Word Hyphenation Options box as well.In Word you should also set Hyphenation | Automatic.  If you cautiously set Word Hyphenation | None the import will throw a “Hyphenation” override on the hyphenated paragraph styles, even though this maikes no sense.
You may still pick up some hyphenation related overrides on your heder styles, if you have set the headers not to hyphenate.  You can either dump the overrides in InDesign or you can set your header styles to hyphenate…and be careful not have any headers actually be longer than one line.
(2) I still haven't found the fix for the Left-to-Right text override.