This is a great hint! Works with Powerpoint->Keynote, too.

When one embeds a PDF figure into Word or Powerpoint, it get bitmapped. BAD! Unfortunately, Pages and Keynote receive these as PNG files, so the vector objects are lost. Darn. This would have made my day.

The other annoyance I've found with Word and PDFs is that it seems to sometimes decide that transparency in a PDF should be rendered as black. Very irratating!

I have found that FileJuicer (http://echoone.com/filejuicer/) is a useful tool in the same situations. Not only does it work with word doc files, but will attempt to extract varied media(audio, video, text, and imags) from most common file types. Best of all, it is only a $9 shareware fee instead of the $79 cost of iWork (unless you already have it).

Hope this helps,

Matt

For raster images (at least) you can also use Copy -> Paste.

Click on the image you're after in the Word File; File>Copy; switch to Photoshop (or whatever): File>New... [Photoshop defaults to size, resolution colour space etc of the Clipboard]; Paste.

[Usually] works a treat.

When using the copy and paste method from Word to Photoshop, you should double-click the image and under the size tab, click Reset. This will bring the pic back to it's original import size, then copy and paste into Photoshop. Obviously we all want clients to send us the high quality originals first time though!