Word makes a mess of html. You can cut down on a lot of it by saving the document as Filtered Html from Word, but there's
still going to be an annoying amount left. I believe there's a similar feature with OpenOffice. Look for an option called
Save as HTML Without Ridiculous, Extraneous Amounts of Style Info Included.
EDIT: Actually, it appears that OpenOffice (my version anyway) has no such option. There's only one Save As HTML choice.