Saving Images from Microsoft Word

Moving content from a Microsoft Word document to another format is not always a straightforward process.   If you are lucky, you can simply select all of the Word content, then use the copy/paste process to move the content into the new format in a single step.  Often the copy/paste method will move the text but not the images.  To move these images, you need to save each image individually to the hard drive and insert the image into the new format.  The following Tech Tip will describe three ways to save images from a MS Word document to your local storage for use in other document formats.

The Right Click

The right click method is the easiest way to export images from a Word document.  This method is great when there are just a few images to extract.  For this method, click on the image in the Word document using the right mouse button.  From the pop-up menu, choose Save as Picture and then choose a directory to save into on your local drive.

When there are a lot of images, this method can be tedious. For instance, the Using Cura for Printing Protein Models – Chimera.docx document requires 25 right-click and save operations to extract all of the images.

We can make this process a little easier by using one of the next two methods.

DOCX to ZIP

By changing the file extension of the Word document from .docx to .zip, we can access all of the images in the document all at once in a single directory.  Follow the steps shown below.

Save as HTML

All of the Word document images can be found in the new directory.