Compress a Word document without touching the words
When you need to compress a Word document, the weight is almost never the text. It is the photos pasted in at full camera resolution, often several megabytes each, when the page only ever shows them a few inches wide.
DocX Image Extractor goes straight for those pictures. Drop a .docx, .pptx or .xlsx on the Shrink the file tab and it measures the result before anything is saved: the size now, the size after, what share of the file is pictures, and two checks, Fits Gmail (25 MB) and Fits Outlook (20 MB). The headline reads something like 4 times smaller, or 62% smaller, followed by the picture count.
Nothing outside the pictures changes. Paragraphs, slides, formulas, fonts and layout are copied across as they were, and a picture is swapped only if its new version comes out smaller.
Reduce PowerPoint file size and compress Excel files the same way
Slide decks are the usual worst case: a photo per slide, each one larger than any projector can show. The same three Picture quality choices apply to Word, PowerPoint and Excel alike, and each is a cap on a picture's long side.
Email (1600 px) suits screens and projectors. Print (2400 px) keeps enough detail for a full printed page. Smallest (1024 px) is for files that only need to look right on a laptop. JPEGs are saved again as JPEG and PNGs stay PNG. Other bitmaps, and vector drawings such as EMF, WMF and SVG, are left alone, so charts and logos stay sharp.
How to shrink a file and check the pictures first
Every step happens before the file is written, so you can back out at any point.
- Open the Shrink the file tab and drop in one file or many, or click Browse.
- Pick a Picture quality and watch the before and after sizes update.
- Click any picture to compare it Before and After. Pictures that would not get smaller are marked Left as it is.
- Keep Save as a copy on to write a new file named Name (smaller) beside the original, or turn it off to replace the original.
- Click Save a smaller copy, or Save smaller copies when several files are queued.
Extract images from a Word document, slide deck or workbook
The Extract pictures tab does the opposite job: it lifts every image out of the file and saves it unchanged, under its real type rather than a generic name. Photos, pictures inside shapes, header images and chart images all come out, which matters when the only copy of a logo or a scanned signature lives inside an old report.
Save pictures to Beside each file puts them in a Name pictures folder next to each document; A folder I choose collects them in one place. Skip duplicates saves a picture used twice only once. With Open the folder when pictures are saved on in Settings, File Explorer opens on the result.
