The only way that I have managed to get documents on to my paperwhite is to email them to the kindle email account.

There is probably some sort of free program that you can download from the internet to convert word files to pdf. The newer versions of word do let you save documents in pdf format, it all depends how old your version of word is.

You may be able to print word files, scan them, and save them from the scanner as a pdf - it's a bit long winded though.