A Technical Aside: How to Best Create in Word and Publish in Blogger?

It has been 20 months since I started blogging and during that period, Blogger has turned out to be a surprisingly reliable platform. Blogger is not without its shortcomings, but all things considered, I have been relatively happy creating posts in Microsoft Word, pasting them into Blogger, and adding the finishing touches with Blogger's own functionality.

Recently, however, whenever I paste something from Word into Blogger, the formatting has not translated properly. At first, I would edit the HTML manually in Blogger, with reasonable results given the effort required. This was an acceptable workaround when most of the rogue HTML code preceded the text of my post and could easily be stripped out in one step. Now the quantity of extra Word-generated HTML seems to be increasing and I find myself left with the option of pasting all the extraneous HTML from Word into Blogger or using an intermediate step such as Word->Notepad->Blogger to strip out all formatting, then reformatting the post and adding all HTML from scratch in Blogger. Neither approach is the streamlined process I am looking for (and enjoyed until recently.)

I have investigated a number of alternatives and have yet to find a satisfactory one. Ideally, I would like to create a post in Word and publish it to my blog in one step, without the loss of any links and formatting I create in Word. There must be some good solutions out there. Readers, what can you recommend?