Hi, Pat,
There are many consideration when importing text from Word into PM. I personally avoid it, for several reasons.
The Word file is unlikely to have been created to a high standard - skilled WPOs are few and far between - the "finished" article will contain multiple spaces instead of tabs, thousands fo unnecessary end of paragraph markers and soft returns, lots of ad hoc character or paragraph formatting, and poor or no use of the style palette which will clash with existing styles in PM or everything will be Normal.
An alternative is to save the DOC file in RTF format, and place that. I don't always find that satisfactory though it is better.
For short pieces of text which are problematic, the text can be cut'n'pasted into Notepad to strip out all the formatting, and then cut'n'pasted back into PM. A PM style can them be applied.
One of the worst Word files I was ever given was a document that had been created using OCR. Every paragraph in the 20 or so page had a different style. Fortunately, I was also given the original pages, so it was quick to convert the OCR generated to plain text and create the appropriate styles in PM.
My limited experience with InDesign2 shows that it imports Word files and tables much better than PM, and there is no doubt in my mind that if I was importing Word files daily, I would be screaming for ID!
If you've not seen ID2, a full working time limited demo is available from Adobe at
(80Mb), plus if you're in the USA or Canada you can "upgrade" for US$299 - a real bargain.
Iechyd da! John
18:23 08/02/03 GMT