Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technology allows embedding and linking to documents and other objects. OLE allows the addition of different kinds of data to a document from different applications, such as a text editor and an image editor. This creates a Compound File Binary Format (CFBF), aka a Compound File, Compound Document format, or Composite Document File V2 (CDF V2) document.
While using my MacBook Pro laptop, which is currently running the
OS X El
Capitan (10.11.6) operating system, I often need to
extract embedded documents from an
Excel .xlsm file. I do that by renaming the file to have a .zip rather than
a .xlsm file extension. I can then extract the files contained
within the .zip file just as I would any
zip file. Within the directory structure created by unzipping the
zip file there is an xl/embeddings subdirectory with .bin
files within it.
$ ls xl/embeddings Microsoft_Visio_Drawing1.vsdx oleObject2.bin Microsoft_Visio_Drawing2.vsdx oleObject3.bin oleObject1.bin $
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