Occassionaly a company will want to convert legacy Microsoft Word documents to a more useful format for long documents like Adobe FrameMaker. This isn't as painful as it sounds. A document on this Techknowledge site serves as a good starting point: http://techknowledgecorp.com.

The goal is to get your source document to look nearly like a plain-text document yet retain its style names, which will be matched up with target styles or tags later, and letting the target application do the things it does best.

Anyone who has attempted this task will recognize sound advice.