RL Vision has announced that its Office Image Extraction Wizard is now open source.

The Windows application is a simple but effective tool for extracting images from Office and many other document types. Although, notably, not PDF (the company has a shareware application for that).

Supported formats include Office 97-2003 (.doc, .ppt etc), Office 2007+ (docx, pptx etc), OpenOffice (odt, ods etc), NeoOffice (sxw, sxc etc), Apple iWorks (.pages, .template), chm, epub, fb2, cbz, dwxf, swf and more.

The program is easy to set up and use. It doesn’t need Office or any other libraries to be installed, and the wizard-based interface guides you through the conversion process. Choose “Batch Mode”, add your source files, select an output folder, click “Start” and that’s it: your documents are parsed and any images saved in just a few seconds.

The straightforward wizard-style interface means you’ll be using the program right away

There is a little more flexibility in a few places, for those who need it. Your images can be saved to the same folder as source file, for instance; or to a new folder for each document; or to a single common folder for everyone.

The only small problem we noticed is that images sometimes had a null timestamp (a date of 1/1/1980 00:00). It’s not a major issue – if you’re just importing the images somewhere else it might not matter at all – but we’d have expected all images to have a timestamp taken from the source document.

The newly free and open source Office Image Extraction Wizard is available now.