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WinZip Basics

While media storage sizes have come a long way in years; we can now plug 2GB flash drives into a USB port as opposed to a 1.44MB floppy disk; the fact remains that some files are too big for our media. You might have a file that's 655MB for example - too big to fit on a CD-R.

Alternatively, you might have a lot of files that you need to send via email or instant messaging. It's a pain to send each one individually, and even more so if they're in a folder structure.

That's where software such as WinZip comes into it's own. WinZip is a compressed archive handler, which means not only can it compress (squash or make smaller) those slightly-too-big files, but it can also wrap up a folder structure or a lot of files into one nice manageable ZIP archive.

This tutorial will show you how to use WinZip to compress a file, put multiple files together, and how to decompress that file. At the end, we'll also discuss a method of sending files to people without WinZip.

Download

First things first, you need WinZip. If you haven't got it (and it's an unwritten law that all magazine cover discs must have it) then download it from http://www.winzip.com/downwz.htm . I recommend you opt for the WinZip Download Server for convenience. You can open it directly or save it and launch in the usual way. Either way, once it's going, you need to follow through the installer.

Installation

The installer for WinZip is very simple. Click Setup on the first screen. After a brief spate of decompressing files, you'll be asked where you want it installed. The default is fine for novice users and to be honest, most professionals.

Now the real decision making occurs. I suggest that, to follow through this tutorial exactly, you choose the options I tell you, but it's not obligatory.

Click Next, and then assuming you agree to the usual terms, Yes. OK, so that step is obligatory. Click Next again. I recommend that you choose the Classic interface, but it is up to you. Opt for Express setup; it's less hassle and click Next. A click on Finish ends the installer and fires up WinZip.

Compression

A quick look at the interface reveals a simple one. There's space to list files in an archive and the usual buttons for New and Open. One thing you need to get fixed is that you don't manually save archives - once you add a file, it's there until you delete it.

To get started, click New. Tell WinZip where to save your new archive and click OK.

As soon as you do that, another dialog appears - this one lets you add files straight away, which is useful, as that's what we want.

Locate your files using the standard bit of the dialog and select them. You can choose more than one. Before you click OK, let's discuss a couple of options.

Once you've selected all the files, click Add.

Note: Maximum (Enhanced Deflate) was an option added in WinZip 9 and earlier versions of WinZip can not read archives compressed in this way. If in doubt, choose the next option down.

Depending on how many files you chose, and how big they are, WinZip might take a while to compress them. As discussed above, the compression ratio is also a factor. The progress is shown at the bottom of the WinZip window.

Right, we're finished here. Close WinZip and you'll be able to go see how small those files are.

If you go to the original files, select them, and hit Alt + Enter, you'll bring up their properties. Look for "size on disk" and note it. Now find your WinZip archive and do the same. Note how the size on disk is (often dramatically) smaller?

Example-wise; I used eight smallish text files to demo this at a total of 36KB. A pittance really, but when you consider WinZip knocked that to a shade under 4KB, it does show the power of the product.

Decompression

Now the fun begins. Those files are useless to us if we want to edit them in their archive - it can't be done. Fortunately, we can go the other way.

Fire up WinZip and click Open. Browse to and select your original archive. Ooh - look at your files, all smug and compressed. Click Extract.

Right, now you're asked where to extract the files to. Locate a suitable place and create a folder to hold the files if needs be.

When you select nothing in the main WinZip window and press Extract, WinZip assumes you want to extract everything. Click Extract.

Find where your files have been extracted to. They're intact and as they were when compressed. Now, delete them.

Go back to WinZip and select one or two of the files. Click Extract, choose a destination, and OK it. Notice how only the files selected were extracted?

Self-Extracting Files

Now you need to consider all those people who might not have WinZip or may not have WinZip 9 (the latter, as discussed earlier, is a consideration for Enhanced Deflate compression) - how are they to open your archives?

Note: Windows XP users can open compressed archives using a rudimentary shell extension - so this isn't a huge consideration for those users. While Windows ME can also use a similar thing, it's not installed by default.

Fortunately, you can use WinZip to create something called a self-extracting file. This is an EXE file which can run on most computers and will do the work of extracting the files.

If you haven't still got it open, run WinZip and open that archive again.

Now, click Actions and choose Make .EXE File. Hurrah for dialogs. This one's really basic. It simply asks you to provide the location of the ZIP file - this is filled in - and a location on the user's computer where the files will extract to by default. This is important - set it to something appropriate, like My Documents, else the user won't be able to find the files. Leaving this blank tells WinZip to default to the user's temp path - not a pleasant thing to try and find under Windows XP.

You can safely ignore the Spanning options and click OK. A message box will appear informing you that the EXE file has been created, and offers to test it for you - click Yes to see what it looks like when run.

Conclusion

Well, now you've learned how to do the following:

If you have simple queries, I'd suggest either contacting WinZip Computing, or using the all-singing, all-dancing STS service from Mintra - just ask a simple question, such as "Can WinZip be used to compress file type X." and you'll get a plain English response.

Author: Rob Church