My boss wants me to send a “compressed zip archive” of our working documents to a client from my Win10 PC. I have no idea how to do this. Help!
Those pesky bosses and their pesky requests! Actually, what you’re being asked to do is surprisingly easy in Windows 10 (and earlier versions of Windows) once you know that a compressed folder and a ZIP Archive are actually the very same thing, just presented differently to make your life easier. No, really, easier. 🙂
Further, you don’t need any extra programs, you don’t need to do a search, check in with Cortana or sacrifice a virtual goat at the altar of the great computer. Just right-click on your desktop.
When you do, a menu pops up and you’ll want to choose “New“:
You can see the choice to make: Compressed (zipped) Folder. I mean, it’s obvious that’s a “Zip Archive”, right?
Anyway, choose that and Windows 10 creates a new folder on your desktop, but it’s a special “compressed” folder:
You should rename it to give it a good, mnemonic name. The “.zip” archive will show up later, so ignore that for now.
I’ll rename mine “Face Audio Recording Archive”, as shown, since I’ll be demonstrating with some audio recordings of the great Boulder a capella group Face:
Looks ready to go. Now it’s easy: just drag and drop the files, documents, photos, pictures, audio recordings, whatever else you’d like to drop into the ZIP archive:
Pay attention to the tip that pops up as you go: You don’t want to “Move” everything to the archive folder because you’ll probably delete it when you’re done, then you’ll have zero copies of the files and documents!
Once you’ve packed everything into the “Compressed (zipped) Folder”, double click and you can even see how much space you’ve saved:
Look at the “Ratio” column and you can see, I’ve saved 3% on each file compressed? Really? 3%? That’s pretty disappointing! Different file formats are more or less compression friendly, so it’s quite possible that the Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and other files you need to send to the client are going to compress further!
At this point it sure looks like a regular folder, but add it to a message in something like Gmail (here shown in Microsoft Edge browser) and it magically shows up as a “.zip” file:
Pretty cool, eh? So that’s how you create ZIP archives in Windows 10. Now you know!