The default is 7z, which produces smaller archives than Zip. 7-Zip includes a wealth of settings but, for the time being, familiarise yourself only with the options under Archive format. To tap into 7-Zip's full range of features and settings, select 'Add to archive'.ģ. To compress the file immediately and save the archive to a current folder, simply click 'Add to "xxx.zip"' (where xxx is the file name). Right-click the file you want to compress and select 7-Zip. Installation is straightforward - a simple matter of accepting the defaults although, depending on your PC's setup, you might be prompted to reboot.Ģ.
Grab the version of 7-Zip most suitable for your operating system. This has all the features of its rivals and costs a grand total of zip.ġ. Throughout this workshop, we'll be using 7-Zip. Once the trials expire, you're expected to dig into your pocket.
The big hitters here are WinZip and WinRAR but, while both are great, neither is free. To unleash the format's full power and flexibility you'll need to use a third-party utility. Windows comes with built-in Zip support, but this is limited to basic creation and extraction. We'll be focusing on compressing files for use as email attachments over the following pages. Indeed, without compression, some attachments might be too big to email at all. Uploading and downloading email attachments can take an age, but compression lessens the burden. Zip files (also known as archives) have numerous uses, but are perfect for emailing documents and images. To decompress a batch of files, simply extract it. Files are reduced in size, but everything is left intact. Lossless compression is what the ubiquitous Zip format is all about. Can you imagine what would happen if you stripped all the spaces out of a Word document? What's required here is 'lossless' compression. Data is irretrievably lost but, unless the compression is overly aggressive, an MP3 version of a track should be perceptually near-identical to the original.įor data such as text, however, lossy compression is useless. This reduces file sizes by stripping out data deemed inessential - frequencies beyond the range of human hearing, for example, and sounds masked by other noise. MP3 files, Jpegs and Mpeg2 videos all use 'lossy' compression. Converted to MP3s, however, the files are compressed to just 60MB. A typical album in CD format uses about 600MB of storage. Ever since the computer age began, boffins have worked to reduce the amount of space required by digital data through compression.
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