Exporting graphics from MS Office
I couldn’t believe how difficult it is to get graphics back out of Microsoft Office documents. Someone came to me today for help with recovering graphics from a Powerpoint file. They had inserted the graphics and since lost the original scans, so all that remained were the ppts.
First thing anyone thinks of in Windows is right-click to save the image, which she did. Nothing. (She’s probably still on Windows NT/ Word 97). So she copied all the graphics out of the powerpoint, then couldn’t figure out what do do with the clipped images, so pasted them into Word! And sent me the resulting Word documents. I figured, no problem, just copy each graphic and paste into Photoshop, then save. Nooooooo! You lose a lot of quality that way. You can see nice subtle grayscale antialiasing in the word version, but the photoshop version looks like a bad xerox.