My problem was this: I needed to copy one document into another document, the latter containing a TOC. However while I wanted to preserve the formatting, I didn't want to copy over the style information as that was creating unnecessary entries in the TOC.

What I found was that after saving the document as RTF, opening it in Wordpad, making a change and re-saving it as suggested by Macropod, MS Word still retained style information. It seems that Word has a smart way of figuring out which style particular text should use.

So I followed Charlznine's reco and opened the RTF in OpenOffice and copied over the text as desired. Presto!

Thanks to both Macropod and Charlznine for this