Who needs WinZip, anyway?
Welcome to Advisorator’s Tip of the Week, helping you learn something new from the tech world every Tuesday!
Inspired by reader’s inquiry, here’s a friendly reminder that you don’t need WinZip—or any paid file extraction software—anymore.
The ZIP format is useful for transferring lots of files in a single package, and a many apps use it for this purpose. If you download an entire folder’s worth of files from Google Drive, for instance, they’ll all come bundled as one ZIP file.
For more than two decades now, Microsoft has built ZIP file support right into Windows. Just right-click any ZIP file and select “Extract All,” and Windows will copy all the enclosed files to a new folder. Conversely, you can highlight multiple files, right click, and select “Send To > Compressed (zipped) folder” to create a new ZIP file.
The procedure is similar on MacOS: Just double-click any ZIP file to copy its contents into a new folder, or right-click a group of files and click “Compress” to roll them into a ZIP file.
What if you come across a more exotic archive format, such as RAR or 7Z? Check out PeaZip or The Unarchiver for MacOS. Both are free with no ads or in-app purchases, and can compress or extract practically any format. Sorry, Corel.