Best Way to Clear out Word Formating?

I am trying to update one of my works.

Unfortunately, an editor had converted it to Word and filled it with styles.

Whenever I opened the resulting document in LibreOffice, it would freeze, until I identified and cleared out the bullet points. Whenever I added new sections, headers, entries to lists, etc. it would go haywire, with the wrong formatting and the wrong numbering.

Whenever I slip when trying to select anything, and end up crossing the column margin, I select way too much.

For some reason, it’s actually divided into two columns, but the page preferences page says it’s only one column, so I can’t reduce it to one column.

I am clumsy so this happens all the time. It’s bad enough with slipping to the previous or next line, but ridiculous with columns.

I can’t see any solution except to select all, copy, and paste as plain text in a new document. I’ve done that with a previous draft, but I still had to clear out malfunctioning bullet points.

Do the bullet points survive the plain text copy/paste operation? Try c/p to a plain text editor. Then from there into LO. Still a workaround though.

Open it in MS Word and convert it to an older version of doc format e.g. 2000/XP/2003 or even older. It may make it more compatible with LibreOffice since older versions have less features and they are usually better understood by LibreOffice.