One of my favorite features in CS2 appears at the bottom of the Word Import Options dialog box: Custom Style Mapping.

This is the feature to use if you’re receiving Word files that the author has applied their own style sheets to, either the ones built into Word (like Heading 1, Heading 2) or ones they created all by themselves, the dears; and you want InDesign to automatically to replace those with equivalent styles (differently-named, though) you created in your layout file as you import the document.