atw: MS Word to Help: free, simple... possible?

Hi all -
A colleague of a friend has a simple online manual in Word format (Word XP I think) and needs to turn it into HTML help. I've never had to go this route myself, so while I know it's possible I don't know if it's practical.
My understanding is the official path is to save the Word doc as HTML, then use the free MS HTML Help Workshop to bundle the HTML pages into a CHM. I guess you need to stick to simple formatting and use the built-in heading styles to ensure that document can be split neatly into topics and subtopics. If the Word doc was not written with help output in mind, I imagine some tidy-up would be needed. In fact I've seen a comment in the HATT archives that the extra hours of manual effort needed to work with the free Help Workshop would account for any money saved.
Is this a fair summary? It's possible to convert a Word XP doc to online help using HHW but it will probably be fiddly and labour-intensive.
Are there other viable tools that are free or very cheap (say, < $100)? Ideally there would be a FOSS Help editor that could import Word, or a simple Word-to-Help converter. But I can't recall hearing of anything like that.
Related question: is there a Word template designed for authoring help topics? 

Any suggestions?

Thanks

Stuart
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