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Extract images from Microsoft Word 2007 / 2010 documents, the easy way

February 18, 2011 by Andrew Block

So, I had to put together a user guide for work. I used a bunch of screen shots that I had capture with SnagIt, and pasted them all directly into the rather lengthy Word doc.

But, when it came time for the designers to actually make the guide pretty, they asked me if I had saved the images anywhere. Oops! I needed to figure out a way to extract the images from the Word doc somehow — and quickly! As always, Google was my friend.

So here’s what to do (only works with Office 2007 and up): make a copy of the Word document, and change the extension of the newly-made copy to .zip. Now open up the new .zip file, go into the ‘word’ folder, and then into the ‘media’ folder. You’ll see that all of the images that are in that document should be in that folder, as PNGs. The other nice thing is, they are generally in the right order that they appear in your document.

So that’s how I saved my butt from having to re-do 50+ screen captures. Maybe it’ll save yours, too.

Questions? Something I wrote doesn’t make sense? Let me know below.

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2 Comments »

  1. Ray Gesualdo says:

    Also, for those running 7-Zip, you can right-click on the .docx/.pptx and select 7-Zip > Open Archive to extract them from there. That way you don’t have to make a copy if you don’t want to. (Understandably, a copy would prevent any possible corruption to the original file, but the odds of that happening are slim to none.)

       0 likes

  2. Andrew Block says:

    Thanks for the tip, Ray.

       0 likes

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