Unfortunately, copying an image made in Designer isn’t as simple as it should be. Here’s how to grab images made with Designer to use in your own Office documents.
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It’s easy to paste an image into Designer. Just copy the image from your app (like Word or PowerPoint), switch to Designer then paste it (Ctrl + V or right-click menu). See Designer Erase is a picture edit opportunity for all Office users
It’s not so easy to get an image from Designer back into an Office or other app.
We’re talking here about the individual images either Generated by Designer’s AI system (Dall-E) or uploaded. They appear in Designer under ‘My Media’ but there’s no way to download those images as
As we type this, you can select and copy an image from Designer but Windows doesn’t know what to do with the content. The clipboard shows ‘Preview not available’. We don’t know if that’s a bug in the current Designer preview or deliberate. It’s a long-standing behavior so it’s either deliberate or a very low priority for bug fixing. Try copying from Designer and see what happens when pasting. Maybe it’ll be fixed by the time you read this.
Failing that, you’ll need some workaround to get the edited image back to your computer. There’s a few available, here’s the best three.
Find the original image in OneDrive
All images either generated or uploaded are saved in your OneDrive account in the folder Apps/Designer/My Stuff so that’s the place to go for all your Designer images in the best size and resolution available.
Go to your OneDrive account on the web (or possibly synchronized to your computer) and there are all the images as separate JPG files.
You might be surprised by what you find there because Designer squirrels away all generated images including ones you didn’t choose for a full design. Select any image and there’s a Download option available on the top menu.
Screen shot
If digging around in OneDrive isn’t to your liking, there are other options …
The fast choice is taking a screen shot, a trick we often use to quickly copy images from anything we see on the screen. Increase the Designer Zoom to 100% or whatever is large enough for your needs.
Then use a screenshot app or the in-built options to select part of the screen and copy it. Win + Shift + S in modern Windows. Command + Ctrl + Shift + 4 on a Mac. Taking screenshots, your guide for Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad and more
Copy as image
Under the Designer Download button there’s a ‘Copy as image’ option. Click on that then paste into whatever Office app you like.
This gives you an image of the entire Designer canvas, not just the image. You’ll have to use the Crop tool in Office (on the Picture Tools tab) to remove the excess.
Designer Erase is a picture edit opportunity for all Office users
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Resizing for Office documents in Designer
