Word conversion from pages is corrupted

It's difficult to answer your question without more concrete examples of "all garbled." But the answer is probably "no, there's no one setting to make everything work out the way you want."

Since the two programs are very different, it's challenging to get a one-to-one correspondence of document formats when you export out of Pages to .doc format.

In general, my advice is that your exported .doc files will look closer to your Pages documents if you use Pages' Word Processing mode, rather than its Page Layout mode.

Mixing images with text, especially in a page layout fashion (with text wrapped around images and the like), is especially problematic, since the .doc format isn't as well suited as Pages for that sort of thing.

If you want your associates to see just what you are creating, you are probably better off to send them a PDF from Pages than to try to use .doc format. If they need to make changes/edits/comments to your work, I would suggest that you send them the initial text (without inline images) in RTF, then incorporate their changes into your Pages document by hand, then produce your final document in Pages and end up as PDF.

This does seem to be a missing feature. As I see it, you have two options:

1. Export as *.doc using File -> Export. While not ideal, I imagine almost everything that supports *.docx also supports *.doc.

2. TextEdit is able to save as *.docx. Of course this is only really an option if your formatting is simple.