Thanks for replying. Of course I tried placing the .docx first. For some reason, only the headings are showing, but no text (must be something to do with the way the original Word file was formatted, not by me). But it didn't show the endnotes anyway. Would it normally do so?
So then I tried copying text from Pages (which I have done in the past from earlier versions). When I paste it in InDesign ALL the formatting, including all paras and line breaks, have disappeared. If I save it as a .txt and try to place that, it retains the paras but loses all other formatting. It does place the endnotes but has inserted some strange letters and symbols and has lost its numbering. If I copy the contents from the .docx and paste it into a TextEdit file, then save that as a .rtf, that all looks great when placed in InDesign, except that it excludes the endnotes as I wasn't able to copy them, so that's no good either. I have tried every other permutation I can think of.
I have even tried making a pdf of the .docx, which does show the endnotes, selecting them (which it allows me to do) then copying that text and pasting it into InDesign. But it doesn't paste them. I think that might be an InDesign problem. Incidentally, I have tried changing the clipboard handling preferences in InDesign.
But my original question is really: how can I turn these endnotes into 'ordinary' text, so they behave like text and can be copied. Although I only have about a dozen endnotes in this document, it is the first in a series of 18 documents which will be similar, so I need to find out how to get around this, short of typing them all out again, which is mad.