Your guide Carrie Marshall says… “Whether you’re freeing up storage space or sending lots of files to other people, Windows’ built-in file zipping will make your life so much easier”
If tech years are like dog years, then zip files were invented 217 years ago – and despite their age they remain incredibly useful things in 2020.
Zip files take a bunch of files and/or folders, squash them down and package them up as a single, smaller file that’s better for sending, for sharing on the likes of USB sticks and for freeing up hard drive space. And in Windows 10, zipping files is baked right into File Explorer.
The files we use today are a lot bigger than the ones we used to zip back in 1989. Back then, PCs with 10MB of hard disk space seemed pretty fancy; today, it’s not unusual for a single smartphone photo to be bigger than that. And that means zip files remain incredibly useful: for as long as we need to share, send or store digital files, we’ll want to zip them up to make them more portable.
CARRIE’S BEST TIP Is your zip too big to email? Don’t worry! Upload it to WeTransfer.com and send a download link instead .
Step-by-step Easy zips in just a few clicks
1 Find your files
The first thing you need when you’re zipping files is to find the files you want to zip. To do that, locate them in File Explorer and select the ones you want to zip. You can choose to select all the files in a folder [Ctrl] + [A]), or you can select some but not all of the files by holding down [Ctrl] and clicking the file(s) you want. You can select entire folders as well as or instead of files.
2 Find the zip
In this screenshot we’re zipping files we’ve stored in our OneDrive, so you’ll see the little OneDrive status icons next to each file name. Select the files you want to zip, then move to the File Explorer’s menu bar and select Share. You should now see a toolbar with the usual Share, Email, Print icons on it. The one we want is the yellow folder that says Zip.
3 Name your folder
You should now see a new, zipped folder in the same place as the file(s) you were zipping. Windows automatically names it but you can easily rename it by typing your own descriptive name in the highlighted field. You can now interact with your zipped folder just as you would with a normal file: you can cut and paste, drag it to a different location or into a Mail message, and so on.
4 Check the size
Right-click over your zip folder to find out how big it is. This is important because some email services have limits on how big file attachments can be, for example Gmail accounts have a 25MB limit. As you can see, our Zip would be too big to send via Gmail – but there are ways around that, as we explain in the Top Tip. It�
