In this guide, we will show you how to extract images from an Office document of any type (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), so that you can always keep them at hand and reuse them in other programs or share them on social networks or group chats.
Some are so simple that they don’t require any external programs, while other methods require you to use some simple and free tools for the purpose.
How to extract images from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
First, it is important to know that Word documents from the Docx, Excel spreadsheets in .xlsx, and Powerpoint presentations in .pptx they are, in fact, gods compressed archives such as zip or RAR files.
Being compressed archives, a program to extract the archives is enough to extract the images as separate files to be saved.
How to extract images from a Docx, .xlsx or .pptx file
Between best programs to open zip or RAR archives we can immediately use 7Zip, free, and really effective for the purpose.
7Zip, after installation, enables a new menu to the context menu that appears by pressing the right button on a file then, by pressing the right button on a Docx, .xlsx or .pptx file, we can choose to extract the archive to a folder.
After extracting the contents of one of the files mentioned, just go to the extracted folder, enter the folder word (or excel or PowerPoint) and then click on average, where we can find the image files extracted from the document. The images are always extracted in their original natural format used by the creator of the document and without making any transformations, leaving the highest quality.
How to extract images by converting documents to HTML
To extract images from an Office document of any type, including simple documents doc, .xls and ppt (typical of old versions of Office), the simplest and most banal procedure of all is to open the file with the appropriate program (Word, PowerPoint or Excel), press the top left on the menu File, then on Save as and finally choose in the field Save as the voice Web page.
The document will be displayed in HTML format (the one for publishing on the web) but, in its creation, the folder with all the files in the document is also generated.
By saving a document called pippo.doc, then both the foo.html is the folder pippo_file which contains all the extracted images of the document in their original format.
If we don’t have Office installed on our computer (remember that Microsoft’s suite is only available for a fee), we can do the same procedure using the free LibreOffice suite.
After downloading the suite we open the Office document from which to extract the images with the apps LibreOffice Writer, Calc or Impress (the free counterparts of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), we press the top left on the menu File, click on Save with name and, in the field Save as, make sure to select the format HTML document.
An HTML file will be saved with the textual content of the document and the image files next to it, ready to be used.
How to extract images with a dedicated program
If we prefer to use a specific program to extract images from Office documents we can rely on the Office Image Extraction Wizard.
This simple program provides a wizard to extract images and photos inserted into an Office document, to save them on your computer separately. If we have more documents from which to extract the images (even in different formats), just put the checkmark on Batch Mode and press on Add files to add all files to extract images from.
The peculiarity of this program is the support for any type of file: it can also extract images from old Office documents (doc, PPT, and XLS).
How to extract images online
In addition to the methods seen so far, we can also act with some web apps, without installing anything: all we have to do is open the web browser and visit the pdfaid.com site, which offers an effective image extractor for Word.
To use it, simply press the button Select Word file, choose the format of the images (for example .jpg), and finally start the procedure; all the images contained in the document will be extracted and compressed into a file, ready to be downloaded via the browser itself.
If we are looking for a site to convert PPT files into an image folder, we can use ZAMZAR; if instead, we want to convert Excel XLS files into various images, we recommend using the IdrSolutions site.
For other sites useful for converting Office or high-format files, please read our guide File converters for all formats and types, sites, and programs.
Conclusions
Using one of the methods seen above we will be able to extract images from an Office document and reuse the images present on the documents for work, for study or to share them in a chat or group on WhatsApp.
If we want to extract images from a PDF file, it is better to convert it immediately into a Word document (as seen in the guide Best programs to convert PDF to Word) and to use one of the methods above.
If, on the other hand, we want to convert PDFs to image files directly, we can read our guide How to Convert PDF to JPG Images.