<p>I use Visual Basic and an automation interface to retrieve strings from an external application. These strings contain simple html formatting codes (&lt;b&gt;, &lt;i&gt;, etc.).
Is there any easy function in Visual Basic for Word to insert these strings into a word document and convert the html formatting codes to word formatting?</p>

AFAIK there is no builtin function to do that in VBA. You will have to write it yourself, which would be not too difficult if you restirct it to parse
```
<b>, <i>, <a> and <p>,
```
for example. All other tags would have to be ignored.