Tip of the Week: Export Images from Word Files
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Did you know that Word’s DOCX file format is a glorified ZIP file? Change the extension to ZIP, unzip it, and you’ll find all of the document’s original assets, including the images as individual files in a folder.
More importantly,InDesign can access the original high-resolution images when you place a DOCX file, even if they’re CMYK. The older DOC format converts all images to RGB PNG files.
That is so cool! You learn something new every day. Thank you!
Mind. Blown! This will make our Word-to-InDesign proposal files so much easier to transfer. Thank you!
Also works with Powerpoint files.
Great, thanks!
This is interesting and I was delighted to read it. For some odd reason, I found that when I tried to unzip the Word file I had relabeled as “”.zip” it gave me a new file with the prefix “.zip.cpgz” instead. So how do I open this? I tried following directions to open it through Terminal, but that doens’t work either . . .
Use an app like the free Unarchiver. https://theunarchiver.com/
I really love this..Thanks
I tried this, changed the suffix to .zip. Opening the .zip file produced a new archive, with the suffix .zip.cpgz. Not usable, I don’t think.
Opening the .docx file in Word and using ‘Save As’ command for .htm format, creates a folder with image files as .jpeg and .gif.
Changing it to .zip would save a step.
Mac OSX 10.13.6
Word Mac 2011 v.14.2.4
That is probably a macOS bug.
It happens to me alot with other non-Word .zips
If the Word doc (and its underlying .zip) is not corrupt, you could try “The Unarchiver” – a free zip tool that works around the .cpgz issue.
Or search for .cpgz on Google and there are also terminal commands and a few other workarounds.
I was so excited to learn this is possible but when I try it, it doesn’t work for me. I keep getting the “Unable to expand … It is an unsupported format.” message. All I did was change the .docx to .zip from within Finder. Is that all that’s needing to be done? What am I missing?
you have to unzip the file, like Mike Rankin said above
Meert: Yes, I tried to unzip the newly named file but I got that error message. What I wanted to know was if I needed to do anything else to the Word doc besides just changing the extension by renaming it, like is there a different way to zip it. I’ve tried this on several Word docs now and none of them will unzip, I just get the error message.