Understandable point. I certainly don't expect perfection. However, it should be functional enough to realize that if I'd like an unformatted paragraph, it should output "<p>My Text</p>" rather than "<p class=MsoBodyText align=left style='text-align:left'><span style='mso-bookmark: _Toc137009781'>My Text</span></p>" for EVERY SINGLE PARAGRAPH!!!!
Assuming that the HTML is intended for a web page, I would suggest embedding an editable area in the web page so that the employee can edit it directly online, bypassing Word altogether.
That would be great, but unfortunately my client base is the corporate travel industry, which is highly comprised of below-average-intelligence, middle-aged women. There is no possibility they will abandon Word. I've been trying to talk them into Google docs for a while now, to no avail.
When I convert Word documents to HTML, I “clean” them of their formatting by copying/pasting them into a plain text program (Notepad) first. Then I usually paste the cleaned text into Dreamweaver.