This Mac tip is provided by Mark Greentree and was originally posted on Mark’s blog – Everyday Mac Support. For more of Mark’s tips visit his site, follow him on Twitter, or browse his archive of posts here.
How To: Create A Compressed Zip File
Have you wanted to create a Zip archive file of information but were unsure how to go about doing it or if an additional application was required?
In this article we will explore one possible option which is built into the Mac OS.
Simply select an individual file, series of files, or a folder you wish to compress into a zip archive. Then navigate to File > Compress Folder (if you have multiple files or individual files this will be different) as shown below:
Please note you can also right click over your selection in the finder as shown below to select the compress functionality:
Depending on the size and the volume of files you intend on placing into the zip file it can take a few seconds to minutes to create the final file which will look like this:
Please note that an individual file or folder will retain the same filename but with .zip on the end. A series of files or folders will simply be given the filename Archive.zip. Once the Zip file is created you can easily change the name to whatever you wish.
Using this method you can achieve in most cases up to a 50% decrease in file size. This is very economical on storage should you have limited storage capacity available.
