No, you should definitely not be copying and pasting large chunks of text from Word to InDesign. That’s what the File > Place feature is for! :-)

We have a number of tutorials on this site, and there are also movies on Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning. For example:
https://creativepro.com/mapping-word-styles-indesign-styles-free-video.php
https://creativepro.com/import-word-files-into-indesign-remove-local-formatting-but-keep-italics-and-bold.php

Interesting… it sounds like what you’re trying to do is adjust the way InDesign handles short words in is paragraph composer. That’s a cool idea, and I can see the value. But I don’t think InDesign has any way to do what you’re looking for.

Actually, here’s an idea… you could use the “No Break” feature to keep the short words with the words that follow them. For example, you could set up a grep style inside the paragraph style that looks for 1 or 2 letter words followed by another letter. Like this:

Sacha, I’m not sure your request makes logical sense. You want a DLB to break where to you want it to, but later, if you change the text frame width, then you don’t want it to break anymore? I think you probably just need to use a Shift-Return (forced line break) and later, if the frame changes size, you can use Find/Change to remove all the forced line breaks.

Alternatively, you could change the right indent to force it to break differently. Or you could select the paragraph and turn on Balance Ragged Lines — that might give you the effect you want, even without adding a discretionary line break.

What I like about Michel (Obi-wan) is that he thinks “outside the box” and comes up with very creative solutions to problems. But unfortunately, sometimes his replies are somewhat mysterious and confusing.

Dwayne, you are correct that the Span/Split columns feature is usually used for splitting or spanning multiple columns. But you can actually use it for a single-column text frame, too!

And the interesting thing about Span Columns is that it has a Space Before Span and and Space After Span feature. That means the feature lets you “group” paragraphs together, like this:

Oh my gosh, you are right. Drat!
OK, so the answer is: Balance Columns disables Keep Options. (That’s sad, though it is a little bit understandable. There would be no way to truly balance the columns and maintain the keep options.)

Interesting idea! I know they have done a lot of work for Windows Tablets (Surface). And of course there is already Photoshop and Illustrator on iOS (not the full versions, but some of the functions). However, I think it would be extremely difficult for them to put InDesign on iOS. (Other than the cool Adobe Comp app.)