How to zip a file
Knowing how to compress a file or folder on a Mac or Windows PC is helpful. Finally, zipped files and folders are compressed to a smaller size. That means they take up less space on your hard drive or cloud storage. It also ensures that they can be more easily sent via email or other means.
Search online and you’ll find plenty of zip apps, but you don’t need to invest in any of them to be able to compress files. The tools are built into macOS and Windows and create files ending in the .zip extension. To see what’s inside a .zip file, simply double-click it to extract or unzip it.
How to Compress a File or Folder on Mac
1. Want to zip a single item? Right-click a file or folder and Choose Compress from the drop down menu.
Because you only zipped a single file or folder, the zipped file will have the name of the original item.
2. If you want to compress more than one item, Highlight each file or folder with your mouse or trackpad.
You can do this by using Press Cmd+A to select all; click article while Pressing the cmd key; or from Click one item and press Shift before clicking another to highlight everything in between.
now Right-click on your selected items and Choose Compress from the drop down menu.
4. If you zip more than one file or folder, it will automatically be named Archive.zip. You can right click this and select Rename to call it something else if you like.
How to zip a file or folder on a PC
1. Select one or more files or folders. Press Ctrl+A to select all; Ctrl-click to select multiple separate files/folders; or press Shift while clicking to select all files/folders between two selections. Right-click your selection and select Send to.
2. now Select Compressed (zipped) folder.
Your file(s) or folders will be compressed and a zipped file will be created. You can see how significantly smaller the file size is.
And here we go. You now know how to compress files on a Mac or Windows PC. You can also learn how to open zip files on Android or how to backup your local files for free. You may also want to know how to encrypt files on Windows 10 and how to encrypt files on Mac.