Extracting Images from Word 2003 Documents
CAndersen (Kimba)
the lack of Microsoft Photo Editor in Office 2003. I will admit it's
worthless if you don't have a previous version of Office available.
All my documentation projects involve a _lot_ of screen captures. Now,
I suppose I'm lazy for not setting up proper graphics folders and
indexes and all that for all the screen captures, but I find the
documents themselves provide all the organization of the images that I
need.
The major drawback to this occurs when an image needs to be edited.
Once an image is in a Word document, Word will not hand it off to
another application (via copy/cut and paste) in its original form.
Lettering becomes blurred and distorted. And even the seemingly
logical solution of saving the file in HTML format, where images are
saved as separate files, does not produce usable results.
The only application that Word will hand the image to without
distortion is Microsoft Photo Editor. But Microsoft Photo Editor is
not part of Office 2003.
Ever since this image handling peculiarity showed up with Word 97, the
method I've used is: copy the image from the Word document, paste it
into Microsoft Photo Editor, then copy it from there and paste it into
Paint Shop Pro. Edit it, and from Paint Shop Pro copy and paste it
back into Word. (My edits generally involve things that can't be done
in Photo Editor.)
So, the answer is to install Photo Editor from a previous version of
Office. In my case, my previous version was Office XP.
Using the Custom installation option in Setup for the old version of
Office, make sure that _everything_ is marked "Not Available", except
for Photo Editor. Run the installation.
This will, however, install some other shared files that will cause
problems with Office 2003. For example, after installing Photo Editor,
Outlook 2003 threw many errors.
So, the next step is to use the Office 2003 installation CD to run the
Repair Office Installation function.
Everything seems to be running fine now. I can get undistorted images
out of Word via a stopover in Photo Editor, and Word and Outlook are
running without errors.
I don't understand why it's not possible to copy and paste an image
from Word to my graphics software without distortion, I just know it
is. And, for now, there's still a workaround, although Microsoft's
discontinuance of Photo Editor does not bode well for the future.
--
Email address munged. You can figure it out.
Suzanne S. Barnhill
that now Office Update keeps prompting me to update Office XP. <sigh>
--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://www.word.mvps.org
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"CAndersen (Kimba)" <KimbaWLio...@127.0.0.1> wrote in message
news:44070b6aad018c43...@news.teranews.com...
CAndersen (Kimba)
<sbar...@mvps.org> wrote:
>I did this in a vain attempt to regain some thumbnails. What I've found is
>that now Office Update keeps prompting me to update Office XP. <sigh>
I'm sorry to hear that. I have not run into that problem.
However, Outlook did start throwing errors again after I posted.
I found this (incredible) fix:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&threadm=081601c309fd%242ac4c3e0%24a001280a%40phx.gbl&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fhl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26safe%3Doff%26q%3Derror%2B8007007F%2B-%2Bthe%2BFIX!%26btnG%3DGoogle%2BSearch
(in case that breaks when I post it, here's a shorter link:
http://makeashorterlink.com/?M27B623C7
but I don't know when that short version will expire.)
I don't know if that fix will relate to your problem or not.
Component checker found that I had two different versions of
oledb32.dll on my computer, and that was confusing things.
So far, after doing the prescribed manual replacement of oledb32.dll,
Outlook is happy and I can still extract images from Word.