Extracting images from MS Office documents

Monday, 2 June, 2008

For quite a while image handling in MS Office has bugged me. Its never been particularly great for two reasons:

1. When images are inserted, they are done so in a native format and stored at “full resolution” regardless of the print options. There has also never been an option to optimise images in Office documents, leading to hugely bloated files (a blatant commercial plug for NXPowerlite which does a sterling job in performing such a service for all Office documents and versions).

2. You then can’t “export” the images in their original format. Copy/Paste works, but only as a bitmap at screen resolution.

I have taken to using Open Office to open my MS Office documents and doing a copy/paste which is at least at full resolution. However the guys at NXPowerlite suggested an obvious (well it was after I read it) alternative:

1. After Open Office has opened the MS Office document, save it is a native (ODT) Open Office file.

2. Change the file extension from .ODT to .ZIP and open it. Inside the “Pictures” folder will be all the native images.

Its a great tip, although note that the Open Office conversion may not always work perfectly.

  1. focus group

    Saturday, May 7, 2022 - 06:54:44