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.