Zip It!
Posted in: Online Tools
At 8 a.m. Monday morning, I sat down and, as usual, immediately checked my e-mail after turning on my computer. The download progress meter opened, and I sat and watched it move forward in micro-movements, slower than a snail.
“Someone must be sending me a large file,” I thought to myself. I have a fast DSL line in my office, and usually e-mails show up immediately.
To pass some time, I opened up my web browser, read the day’s news, checked my eBay account, paid a few bills online … then returned to my e-mail application. To my dismay, the progress bar had barely budged.
And so I opted to get a bit of work done; I coded several webpages, wrote a report for a client, made a number of phone calls, then went to see if my e-mail(s) had arrived yet. You guessed it. They hadn’t.
Three hours later, two (yes, just two) e-mails showed up. A new client had attached several massive graphics files and e-mailed them to me, along with a note stating that he’d be sending more soon. I had to stop the madness or my e-mail program was going to be backed up for years!
I called the client and told him about WinZip. WinZip is an extremely common, fantastic little application that “zips up” your files before you e-mail them. By “zipping” your files, you essentially take a big file (say a high-quality digital photo of yours) and squash it down flat like a pancake, making it smaller and quicker to send.
Then, if the person you’re e-mailing the zipped file to has WinZip, he or she can simply unzip the file, which “unsquashes” it and brings it back to normal.
In a nutshell, WinZip is a popular compression utility that can compress and decompress your large files. Not just for e-mail, people often compress folders on their computer and make archives, with the compressed information taking up much less space than before.
Here’s an example of WinZip use. I had a folder filled with website information that I wanted to e-mail directly to a contractor’s computer. The folder was 9MB, however - far too big to e-mail. I zipped up the file with WinZip, which compressed the folder down to a much smaller size of 4.35 MB, then e-mailed it with ease.
The contractor used WinZip to open the compressed file on his computer with a few clicks.
Zipping and unzipping is extremely easy. (And I only say something is extremely easy if my dear mother can figure out how to do it - and she can zip and unzip with [relative] ease.) You can read the simple, step-by-step “how-to” instructions and download a free trial of WinZip at www.winzip.com.
