I couldn’t find a free software that would easily do exactly what I want (see the subject). So here’s my ghetto solution, which can be easily automated.
- Change the extension *.docx/.xlsx/.pptx to *.zip
- Unpack *.zip file
- In the unpacked folder go to ‘word/embeddings’ or ‘xl/embeddings’ or ‘ppt/embeddings’
- Rename ‘oleObject1.bin’ to ‘almostThere.rar’
- Unpack ‘almostThere.rar’ (google for the software)
- Go to the folder ‘almostThere/’
- Rename file ‘CONTENTS’ to ‘bingo.cdx’
- Double-click and enjoy
As a free gift from Microsoft you’ll get an .emf image of all embedded ChemDraw schemes in the ‘*/word/media’ folder.
Note 1. Definitely works under Windows 10 with MS Office 2013 documents.
Note 2. Apparently one needs administrator rights on Windows 10 to change file’s extension
Note 3. Doesn’t work with structures added to Excel spreadsheet via ChemBioOffice plugin. Only .emf images are extractable.
Note 4. Backup the data before you mess something up.
Note 5. In fact the last .rar file is not a true RAR archive but decompressing software (e.g. 7zip) would still open it. It can as well be renamed to .tar, .arj, .7z or .cab (but not .zip)
Note 6. Under linux only 7zip could reliably extract files from the oleObject archive, regardless of its extension.
TLP 
Hey, I’ve used it! I’ve got 42 objects and after step 2 made a script:
for ((i=1; i<=42; i++))
do
mkdir $i
7z x oleObject$i.rar -o$i
cd $i
mv CONTENTS $i.cdx
cd ..
done
Thanks!
Cool! Why do you want all cdx files to be in different folders?
Well, somehow I didn’t think of it at that moment.
And that script was after step 4, not 2, my mistake.
Hi, I generated a chemdraw from a Mac, copied and pasted the scheme into Word and saved it. I tried to follow your instruction on Window 10 with Word 2016 but I can’t find the word/embedding folder. All I saw were: “_rels”, “docProps”, and “word” folders. Would you have any suggestion for me? Thank you
Can you still open the scheme in ChemDraw by double-clicking it on Windows? It might be a general Mac-Windows compatibility issue of ChemDraw. I don’t have a Mac with ChemDraw installed to test but I’ve heard about this issue many times before.
Hi, no, double clicking on the scheme won’t work if the scheme was generated on a Mac. perhaps that is the main issue. I don’t have a window machine that have chemdraw, the opposite of your issue. Anyway, thank you so much though!