@AGP - Thanks for reporting this. The extra line breaks are a known issue with the desktop/native version of Microsoft Word and some other desktop apps. We are looking into addressing this in a future update.
The copying improvements mentioned in the blog apply to situations where you're copying text from within the same StoryMap, a different StoryMap, most web pages, and most web-based editing/note-taking apps.
For now, if you can open your document in the web version of Word copying text will work much better. In general, web-based apps and web pages adhere to a consistent standard for text markup (this just refers to the additional, invisible information that stores the format and structure of text) while desktop apps unfortunately do not. Copying from web-based apps almost always works much better, and we've got more work to do to try to wrangle all the bizarre formatting anomalies of desktop apps.
It would also be useful for us to know if you are copying from Word because that's what you are using to write a draft of your story or if you just have a document or report in MS Word format that you need to copy an excerpt from. Would you be able to share some more info about that?
Owen Evans
Lead Product Engineer | StoryMaps