154 Extracting images from a Word document

Somebody just sent me a Word document and I'm going to place it inside this InDesign template. I'll go to the File menu > choose Place and then select it. There it is HOA2.docx. I'll click open and InDesign loads it up into the place cursor, and to import it, I'll I have to do is hold down the Shift key + Click. Remember, Shift + Click tells InDesign to load the entire document, not just this one page. And it'll add additional pages, as necessary. Let's go look at some of those pages. I'll press Option + Page Down, or Alt + Page Down on Windows.

And we can see that InDesign imported all that text and the images. That's right. There were images embedded inside that Word document. There's various ways that people get images into Word documents. Usually, they just copy and paste them. It's nice that InDesign imports those embedded images right along with the text, and in fact, if we look inside the links panel, we can see all those images came along with the ride, and they're all embedded in my InDesign document, too. That's what that little graphic over here means. That means the image is embedded inside the InDesign document.

It does not appear anywhere on disc. Now that might be a problem. I usually like to have my images on disc so that I can edit them later if I want to. You cannot edit images if they are embedded in the InDesign document. Also the InDesign document is made larger with each embedded image. The larger the image the larger the InDesign document. So it turns out that there's a pretty simple way to get the images out of InDesign and onto the hard drive. Here's what you do. Click on the first item in the Links panel, then scroll down to the bottom, and Shift + click on the last one.

That selects all the embedded images in the Links panel. Now all I have to do is go to the Links panel menu, and choose Unembed Link. Now, InDesign asks me this very strange question, do you want a link to the original files? Of course, I cannot link to the original files because I don't have them anywhere, they're in the Word document. So, all I'm going to do is click No and InDesign asks me where do I want to save them. I'll create a new folder here and I'll call it my Image Folder. You can call it anything you want. I'll click Create and then click Choose and InDesign goes through my entire document un-embedding each of those images, putting them in the folder, and then re-linking to them so that this image is now linked to the proper place on my desktop.

Now, as it turns out, there's another way to get those images out of the Word document, and it's a super secret trick, and I just have to tell you about it. Here on the Mac I'm going to switch back to the finder, on Windows it would be switching to Windows Explorer. And I'm going to take a look at this docx file that somebody sent me. You may not realize that these docx files are actually zip archives with a bunch of data inside of them. It's true, and all of those images are hiding inside of that docx file, ready for me to extract. Let me show you how to do it. First, I'll duplicate this file, so I don't mess my original.

I'll just right-click on it, or a control click with a one button mouse, and choose duplicate. Now, I'm going to change the name of this. I'm going to rename this from docx to dot zip. When I press enter, the Mac will ask me, do I really want to use zip? Sure. Let's use Zip. And you'll see it turns into a Zip Archive. Now, I just need to double click on it. Both the Mac and Windows can automatically unzip that so I can see the folder. Double click on it, look inside Word, look inside Media, and look at that, all of those images that were inside the Word document are right there for the taking.

I could just copy them right out, or just drop them right in to InDesign. However you get your images out of your Word documents, you've got to admit that this is a pretty cool trick. Now if you want even more cool tricks having to do with Word and InDesign, you should definitely check out Anne-Marie Concepcion's title here on the On line training library, called using Word and InDesign together