Some further loose ideas for when text boxes don't want to play nicely:

1. Do you have snap to baseline set for your text but are trying to place text in an area where the baseline grid is not defined?

2. If you have a text style with a particularly large font size and perhaps something like “keep with next x lines” (or even “start on a new page”) set this will sometimes refuse to show when the text frame isn't sufficiently large and you just see the overset marker.

Should the latter for some reason be set as the default text style for a new text frame you will repeatedly come up against this problem. To reset the default text frame, make sure no frames are selected and then set the paragraph and object styles to what you want to have as default (or to no setting/basic style).

To add to Jongware's note on whole page boxes that inadvertantly receive the text: try putting them on another layer and locking that layer.

What can often help is to use Acrobat's add tags feature which is really designed for accessibility purposes but often straightens out text in the process: “Menu Advanced > Accessibility > Add Tags to Document”. After that you can copy whole chunks of text and they will (mostly) be contiguous. It's also good for when you try and copy two-column text that copies line for line from both columns.

Just googled to see where I read this and what do I find? Anne-Marie!!

For Mac users FileJuicer is also a good way at getting at any images included in Word (and other file types) and is quicker. You just dump the Word file on the FileJuicer window and it 'juices' it, creating a folder with sub-folders containing any content it finds grouped by file format. You can dump multiple files on FileJuicer at the same time too. Most of the time you'll get the image added to Word in full resolution and vector files are usually found as emf/wmf, which you can open in illustrator. Occasionally it gives you a png rather than a jpg, but that may have been the original embedded file format too.

What it can't find is drawings made with the drawing tools in Word (for that you have to make a PDF and open that page in illustrator) but they invariably need redrawing from scratch anyway.

The first paragraph uses the 'body' style, the second paragraph is the same except it has the 5th word bolded so I make a new paragraph style named 'body bold 1' that has a nested style. The third paragraph now needs to have the 8th and 9th word bolded, so I create a new paragraph style named 'body bold 2' that also uses a nested style. And it keeps going on like this!

Just curious: are these for paragraphs that come up again and again, e.g. you have lots of paragraphs with the 5th word bold, and lots of other paragraphs with exactly the 8th and 9th word bold? If not and you just want to embolden arbitrary words in a paragraph, you can use just one paragraph style 'body' and then just set the words that require it to bold manually, or if you're worried about clearing those manual overrides inadvertently, make a character style called “bold” and use the character style for those individual words. Apologies if this is way too obvious…

I can concur with Hank. The printer will often want to manage it themselves to suit their workflow and even my local repro-shop prefers to do the imposing themselves. If you want to impose for your own purposes, exporting normally from InDesign and then imposing using an acrobat plugin or similar tool works just fine workflow wise.

Professional imposition solutions tend to be on the expensive side but there may be few alternatives if you have very demanding or specific needs. I've used Quite Imposing before when I worked for an agency but for the odd occasion that I need it myself, it is prohibitively expensive. One tip if you happen to work on a mac: a much more affordable program that has covered all my imposition requirements up to now is PDF Clerk Pro which has a special imposition module (and a polite and responsive developer) and works with PDFs and has saveable imposition schemes. Other options you may want to investigate are Indesign Imposition plugin (website seems to be down but still visible via google's cache) and Croptima Inplate, both of which say they are for PC and Mac (I have no knowledge of either). It's worth trying them out and putting them through their paces with an actual scenario (ideally a couple of different typical cases) before buying.

(sorry about all the editing, links keep on being ruined after editing)