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.
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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.