I often times compose in Word for the simple reason that it is the only program that offers me an emergency save if we have a power outage and I haven't manually saved it recently (or at all). It's a pain in the butt to have to recreate a document after a power blip.

To scrape off all of the Word nonsense I do "control A" and "control C" to select all then copy it, then "control V" to paste it into a notepad document. I can work with it from there to add to my html, etc. Or you could repeat that and pick up the document from notepad and drop it into a new Word file. As was said above, that leaves behind the formatting.

I don't think I an saving versions of my documents because I think you have to set it up to do that. You might poke around in the preferences to see what your program is set to do.

SRS