File compression software reduces the size of large files and bundles multiple items into a single package, making them easier to transfer and store. This topic covers how to use Windows built-in compression to create ZIP archives without third-party tools.
File Compression Software
Another thing that can be really handy on our computers is software that helps compress files. This is more important when we're sending files across the internet or to somebody else and the files are really large. Sometimes our files can get quite large, and trying to send them via, let's say, email, or send them across the network, or even store them locally, can be problematic. Well, some of these files can be compressed. There are programs out there that will reduce the size of these and compress them into a smaller package. Not only that, but sometimes we have lots of little programs and stuff that we want to compress into a single file. Well, that's where compression software can come into play.
I did a quick Google search for compression software, and what came up was a lot of options. There's a lot of options that are out there. I've used 7-Zip before. I've used WinZip, RAR, WinRAR. So I've used these before, but I'm not going to get real in-depth into that, because we do have a basic compression that's already on the machine.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to use the downloads folder to see what this looks like. First of all, I've got some programs in here, so we already got some stuff that we can work with. I'm going to click on download and take a look at the properties, and it's 4.23. So let me just copy that, so we got a beforehand. In fact, I think I can keep that properties open as well. And then I'll bring up just a record.
So we've got that. I'm going to right-click on here. I'm going to say new, and I'm going to do the compressed/zipped folder here. So I'll do the compressed folder. We're going to call it test 123. We'll hit enter. What I can also do is I can do the invert selection, and it's going to select everything else in this folder, and I'm going to drag it into here. And this is probably going to take a little bit, because what it's doing is it's taking those files and folders and looking at ways that it can compress it. So we're going to give this a little bit of time to do the compression, and then we'll see how big the actual file is in the end. Right now it's just 1 kilobyte. So if we get it to be less than 4.23 GB, then we've been successful. Once again, what this is doing is both compressing this and also packaging everything up into one file, this zip file.
Looks like it's finished up. I'm going to right-click on this and say properties, and we can see that this 4.23 GB that it was before is now 4.18 GB. So we shrunk it about 50 megabytes. So that's not like a ton. It's not a huge amount, but it's certainly smaller. 50 megabytes is definitely smaller. So it did shrink it a bit.
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