How to Migrate from Word to DITA
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Migrating Microsoft Office® Word documents to XML in general and to DITA in particular is quite a frequent encountered situation. As usual migration from proprietary formats to XML is never perfect and manual changes need to be made to the converted content. But the possibilities I'm listing below should give you some idea about finding the best approach in your case:
  • Open the Word document in MS Office, select all the content and copy it. Then open Oxygen, create a new DITA topic in the Author visual editing mode and paste in it. Oxygen's smart paste functionality will attempt to convert the HTML to DITA.
  • MS Office has the potential to save Word documents to HTML. Once you obtain that HTML you have two possibilities:
    • Use Oxygen's File menu->Import->HTML to import the HTML as XHTML. Then open the XHTML in Oxygen and in the "Transformation Scenarios" view there should be 4 pre-configured transformation scenarios for converting XHTML to DITA topics, tasks or concepts.
    • Open the HTML file in any Web browser, select all its content and copy it. Then open Oxygen, create a new DITA topic in the Author visual editing mode and paste in it. Oxygen's smart paste functionality will attempt to convert the HTML to DITA.
  • Open the Word document in the free Libre Office application, then save it to Docbook. Then open the Docbook document in Oxygen and there is a predefined transformation scenario called DocBook to DITA which you can apply.
  • If the Word document is in the new DOCX format you can open the DOCX in Oxygen in the Archive Browser view and then open the "document.xml" contained in the archive. If you press the "Configure Transformation Scenario" toolbar button you will see you have a predefined transformation scenario for it called "DOCX DITA". This ANT scenario runs the build file:

    OXYGEN_INSTALL_DIR/frameworks/dita/DITA-OT/plugins/net.sourceforge.dita4publishers.word2dita/build-word2dita.xml

    over the DOCX archive and should produce a DITA project with a Map and multiple topics. But it may also need some reconfiguring in order to map DOCX styles to DITA content. This would be a solution which could also be run automatically with scripts because it is based on the DITA OT and the Dita For Publishers plugins.