Paste from Word Problem

I knew about “don’t paste from Word into WordPress” as a “solution”. But my question is really why this suddenly stopped working. I don’t think this was a change in Word behavior because Word always included this stuff in the clipboard when you do a copy. TinyMCE always stripped it out until now. The TinyMCE editor does have a feature for Paste from Word but it no longer strips these tags. Pasting into Notepad doesn’t work because you lose all of the formatting information including bold and italic. LiveWriter and other blogging tools don’t work because they convert smartquotes into regular quotes and em dash into a regular dash (and I would like to avoid that).
The only good workaround I found is to use the http://word2cleanhtml.com/ website to remove the tags and then copy and paste from there into WordPress.

I found that I could paste from Word and keep the simple formatting (e.g., bold and italic) but get rid of all the Microsoft Word specific formatting by adding the following to the functions.php (in my theme).

function change_mce_options( $init ) {
 $init['extended_valid_elements'] = 'span[!class]';
 $init['paste_auto_cleanup_on_paste'] = true;
 $init['paste_strip_class_attributes'] = all;
 $init['paste_remove_styles'] = true;
 return $init;
}
add_filter('tiny_mce_before_init', 'change_mce_options');

function get_rid_of_mso_junk( $content ){
  return preg_replace( '/<!--\[if gte mso.*?-->/ms', '', $content );
}
add_filter( 'content_save_pre', 'get_rid_of_mso_junk' );