How to Extract Images and Excel Files From a PowerPoint File

Are you a user of PowerPoint 2010 or newer? If so, you have probably noticed that the file extension of your PowerPoint presentations is PPTX, correct? Imagine that you have a slide deck, but you want to extract the original size photos or some other type of content that’s in it — for example the Excel files behind the charts?

How do you do that? Is it possible at all?

Turns out, it is and here are the steps that you can take to extract any content from any PowerPoint presentation:

1. Find the PowerPoint presentation that you are interested in.

2. Create a copy of it. Just copy -> paste the file in the same or different folder (you need that additional copy just to be on the safe side as operation like this can corrupt the PowerPoint file!)

3. Now take a look at the name of the file. Do you see the “.ppxt” extension? If not, go through those steps (on a Mac you see the extensions by default). If you are dealing with a presentation that is using the old PPT format then open it and Save it As PPTX presentation. Now move on with the next steps.

4. Once you have the copy of the file and see the file extension, go ahead and rename this file. How? Just remove the .pptx and put .zip

(yes, make the PowerPoint file an archive!)

5. Once you do that, right click on the file and extract it to a folder on your machine.

6. Open that folder and go to the “ppt” folder. What you are looking for is there. If it’s photos — they are in the “media” folder. If these are Excel files — look for a folder called “embeddings”.

There you have it! Now you know how to extract the content of a PowerPoint presentation!

Enjoy and share with your friends but don’t forget to tell them to work with a copy of their file! If you want to learn more tricks like this, check out our online PowerPoint Tips & Tricks course where I teach more than 40 similar tricks that will help you build better presentations faster!

Who's Boris:

Boris is the Founder of Presentation Agency 356labs and a PowerPoint MVP. He is also a top-rated international speaker who has delivered presentations in more than 25 countries and has been rated as the top speaker numerous times. Boris has years of experience as a trainer, mentor and consultant and works with companies like Deutsche Telekom, KPMG, Renault, Societe Generale, Roche, Publicis Group, Experian, Bosch, VMWARE, adidas and many, many more to help them craft and deliver truly effective presentations. His agency is also the only presentation agency in the world speaking at Microsoft Ignite - the biggest yearly event of Microsoft, attended by more than 25 000 people. Boris is also a Pluralsight Author and loves sharing his knowledge at events, podcasts, webcasts or on his personal blog.

Originally published at 356labs.com on January 9, 2019.