Zipping and Unzipping Files

Unzipping

Many files that you download from the Internet have been put into a ZIP file and need to be unzipped before they are usable and accessible.

They are usually put into ZIP files (and sometimes self-extracting zip files) in order to keep a collection of files together and inside one file for easy distribution and also to keep the size small to save on space and bandwidth when downloading and storing these files.

There are a number of different compression formats but the most common format used on Windows systems is called ZIP and the most common program used to "unzip" or "zip" these files is called WinZip. You can use Google to search for WinZip or download it from here.