I’ve written before the frustrations of working with OpenXML document formats on a Mac but this evening I found out that a lack of native support for these files can be very useful. I downloaded a .docx file that I wanted to lift some graphics from – of course, Mac OS X and Office 2004 for Mac didn’t recognise the file but it’s really just a .zip file and after letting StuffIt Expander work on the document, I was soon able to locate and extract the images that I wanted from the document! Very efficient.

Of course, this was on a Mac, but the same principle applies for a Windows or Linux (or even MS-DOS) PC. If you can find a utility that can read .zip files, it should have no problem extracting the constituent parts of an OpenXML document.