Extracting bulk OLE objects word documents

[JR]

I have thousands of Word documents that have attachments of various
kinds in them. Most Word, some Excel or Powerpoint and who knows what
else. I need to extract all these attachments from the Word documents
in a batch and save the contents to the hard drive. Key here is naming
also. If they have the same name it must be changed and if somehow a
file was created that listed the new file and the original source it
came from would be good. Any ideas where/how to accomplish this, or if
there is something out there already to do this?

Thanks.

JR

 

[Cindy M.]

Hi Jr,

I have thousands of Word documents that have attachments of various
kinds in them. Most Word, some Excel or Powerpoint and who knows what
else. I need to extract all these attachments from the Word documents
in a batch and save the contents to the hard drive. Key here is naming
also. If they have the same name it must be changed and if somehow a
file was created that listed the new file and the original source it
came from would be good. Any ideas where/how to accomplish this, or if
there is something out there already to do this?

If these are embedded (and not linked) objects, then they won't have any
name, nor any information about the original source. Each document would
need to be opened and you'd need to loop through the InlineShapes and
Shapes collections, checking whether you're dealing with an OLE object.
If you are, you can check the class type in order to know how to proceed
with that particular object.

Each object would need to be opened in a separate window of the
application to which it belongs and that application automated in order
to save the file to disk.

Doable, but resource- and time-intensive.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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