- [Instructor] Every now and then,
you might encounter a zip file.
This is an archived file that contains several other files.
If you download files from the web,
a zip file is pretty common.
Or if you have several files
that you need to send to somebody,
often it's easier to zip them all together into one file,
and then you just have that one file to send.
I'm going to go to my documents folder into recipes,
and I have a zip file here,
but how do I know that it's a zip file?
Well, I recognize the icon, I've seen it before,
but also since I have the details view
here in this type column,
I can see that it is a compressed zipped folder.
But this is a case where it might also really help
if you could see your file extensions.
So I'm going to go into the view menu at the top,
then I'll go to show,
and I'm going to turn on file name extensions.
So now I can see the three-letter extension
at the end of that file identifies it as a zip file.
Okay, so I have a zip file here,
let's see how to open it up.
And really all you need to do is double click on it,
and that opens the zip file.
And it looks very much like I just opened a normal folder.
I'm in the zip file and I can see the contents,
which is all of these files.
But I recommend that you do not try to open and edit
any of the files directly inside of a zip file.
What you should do instead
is copy those files somewhere else,
and that's just a simple matter of dragging them.
So I'm going to select some files inside of this zip,
and I'm going to select a few,
so I'll hold the control key here
and click on another and another,
that's just one way to select multiple files,
and then I'm going to drag them to my documents folder.
So now when I go over to the documents folder,
I can see those three files that I extracted
from the zip file.
Now I still have a copy of those files
inside of the original zip,
and I could delete that zip file
or I could keep it around just in case
I need those original files again at some point.
But with these copies that I've extracted,
I can open them, edit them, copy them, move them.
I can just treat them like any other files.
Okay, so now let's see the reverse.
What if you have a bunch of files
that you want to send to somebody?
I've got that in my client projects folder
inside of this no obstacles folder.
I just have a lot of files.
If I wanted to send all of those to somebody,
I want to group them together as a zip.
So again, you need to select
the multiple files that you want to zip together.
If I want all of them, I could click on the first one,
hold the shift key, and click on the last one
so I have all of them selected.
Then I can click this button with three dots up at the top
to open this general menu
and I can choose compress to zip file.
So whatever you have selected will be compressed together.
And depending on how big those files are,
this can take some time, but now I have that zip file.
Now it already has a name and that name relates
to the first file in the group that I had selected,
so I might want to take the opportunity now
to rename this file.
So I'll type that in, hit return, and that is all set.
And of course you could rename it later if you want.
So now I could send this one file to somebody
and they could unzip that
and they'll have a copy of those files.
Now that's one way to do it.
Another option would be to go to an actual folder.
So if I wanted all of the files in this folder,
I could just select the folder,
and then I could choose to compress that as a zip file,
which would give me a zip file
that has all of the files that were in that folder.
So now I have this one single file
that I can send to somebody
and it contains all of those other files.