HOW TO Easy zips in just a few clicks

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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’s not a problem here, though, because we’re not emailing ours.

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EXTRACTING IS EASY The opposite of zipping isn’t called unzipping, or at least it isn’t in Windows: it’s extracting. Windows enables you to see the contents of a zipped folder by double-clicking on it, and if you look at the top of the window it has specific tools for extracting to commonly used folders such as Documents, Pictures, Music and so on. These extract the selected files to the appropriate place.

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TAKE A LOOK Sometimes you don’t want to extract an entire folder, but you need to see what file it is that you actually want to use. No problem. In Windows 10 you can simply double-click on a file within a zipped folder to see what it is, so for example here we’ve double-clicked on one of the image files so that we can see what it is. The photo opens just like any other photo.

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SHARE OR SAVE In a nice touch, Windows 10 enables you to do things with your photo without having to extract and re-open it: the toolbar along the top has the usual editing options, and you can use the Add To icon to send the photograph to a new photo album. You can also use the share icon – the box with an arrow leaping out of it –to send the image to an app or person.

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EXTRACT IT ALL You can extract all of the files a zip contains by opening it and clicking on Extract All. By default, Windows will create a new folder with the same name as the zip, so for example Daisy.zip on your desktop would be extracted to a new desktop folder called Daisy, but you can choose an existing folder instead – important if you’re opening it from a USB drive.