Before, we didn't have a rich text editor. Simply a plain text editing field, where if you wanted to add formatting, you used html tags. Now, you c/p your text, and format it within the text box, if it's plain text. As I said, if you're using a word processor, you won't generally have to do anything at all, other than inserting the text from your document in to the window that pops up.
With earlier versions of Word, there seems to be an issue with translating the page settings. OO doesn't have this issue. Now, if you have your Word doc set to where it's supposed to add a line after a paragraph, and you add an additional line via carriage return (enter key), you will get another empty line.