Windows: Create ZIP Archive without additional Software

Merging several files in one ZIP folder especially has two advantages. First, ZIP folders require less disk space than their containing individual files because the files are compressed. And the second advantage is that you only have one file instead of a great number of single files.

Particularly when sending e-mails, these advantages pay: the attachment size is smaller and the recipient only has two download one file.

Creating ZIP Folders on Windows

Indeed, there are a great number of different software applications such as 7-Zip to create ZIP files or other archives, but just for creating ZIP archives no additional software is required when using Windows. Just follow the following steps:

1. Go to an arbitrary folder and select the files you would like to zip
2. Right click on the selected files
3. Select "Send To" and "Compressed (zipped) Folder" from the menu

After that, Windows automatically creates a ZIP archive containing all files that have been selected before.

Opening and Extracting ZIP Archive

Also for opening and extracting the files from a ZIP archive, you do not need any additional software on Windows. I have described how to do it in my Windows Tip about opening ZIP archives.