This is really dull, but I wanted to write it down before I forget. I was given some Word and RTF documents, and wanted to extract a logo image from one of them. I spent ages fiddling around with context menus and such, trying to find the elusive ‘save image’ button, but it wasn't there. I could do a screen dump to get it, or copy and paste it into the drawing program and then save the whole thing to get a slightly scaled version, but neither of these gave me the actual image that was in the document, just reconstructed crufted versions of it.
I just came up with the solution. I remembered discovering that OpenOffice saves its documents in a zip file, containing various XML files. I guessed (it turns out correctly) that the images would be stored as separate files within that, since XML isn't exactly the most efficient format for storing images. So the logo I was after is there for the grabbing.
To extract an image, load your document into Open Office (or
‘OpenOffice.org’ as they seem to want to call it) and save it as
an “OpenOffice.org 1.0 Text Document” or equivalent (I expect
Star Office's format is exactly the same). Then unpack the zip file (which
will have the .sxw extension) into a spare directory (so as not to
make a mess), and look in the Pictures directory. Each picture is
stored as a separate image file, apparently in the original format (I've
seen it save them in PNG and JPEG formats).