WinZip The Ultimate Zip File Manager

Paul Mayer, of Paul's Picks recommends WinZip as your Zip file manager of choice. Following are instructions on how to unZip your downloads. We are assuming that you've created two folders on your computer, one named Downloads and the other named Temp and have already installed the WinZip program on your computer. Downloads is the folder where the files are saved when your downloaded them from the Internet and Temp will be the folder that we will extract the files into.

In our example, we will show you how to locate the download, and then extract the contents as well as a few tips on inspecting the files before using them on your computer.

First we must open the Windows Explorer. Click on the Start Menu, then Programs and finally Windows Explorer as shown below.

This will open the Windows Explorer that is used to browse and work with the files on your computer. When you installed WinZip, a few hooks were attached to the Windows Shell which allows WinZip to work as an integrated part of the Windows Explorer. Use the Windows Explorer to open the Downloads folder and locate the new file that you just downloaded and Right Click on the Zip file that is displayed in the Windows Explorer. This is where you will see how WinZip has become a part of the Explorer. Notice the added pop-up menu items, Extract to, Extract to folder and Create Self-Extractor. These are the new tools that you can use to extract the files from all of the Zip files that you download from the Internet.

Extract to will open WinZip with a File Save As Dialog ready for you to pick the folder to extract the files to. This is what we will use for our example. Other features of WinZip, you can learn about in the WinZip help file.

In our example, we are going to save the extracted files to the C:\Temp folder that you created. Look below at the image to see where the folder name is inserted. Note that in addition to simply typing in the folder name and path, you can use the "Folders/drives" Window to locate and select it with your mouse.

After you've entered or selected the path for extraction, click on Extract. The files will all be extracted from the Zip if the All files radio button is selected as shown above. Again, WinZip has a lot of features and you can explore these at your leisure in their help file.

At this point you will be left with the WinZip program open showing the list of files it contains. I'd like to take a moment to insert a tip here while this Window is open. If you simply double clicked on that Zip file in the Windows Explorer in place of the right click, WinZip would have opened the file and displayed just like this without the Save as Dialog:

At that point, you can actually preview some of the files inside of the Zip without extracting them. If you look above, you can see that the "readme.txt" file is selected and the mouse cursor is on the View button. Clicking the View button will allow you to preview the text file before actually extracting any of the files from the Zip archive. I use this feature to preview the files making certain that they are suited for our visitors before uploading them to our libraries. End of tip, and we continue on.

We've extracted the files and you can now close the WinZip Window. Next use the Windows Explorer to move to the C:\Temp folder to inspect the extracted files and/or run the setup.exe file to install the program. After you have installed the Shareware program for evaluation, you can delete the Zip archive from the Downloads folder and all of the files in the Temp folder.

Another tip on using the new features of the WinZip and File Explorer connection. If you've downloaded files that end with EXE rather than ZIP, you can find out if they are self-extracting Zip files or regular setup (installation) files. When you right click on a self-extracting Zip file, you will also see the Zip menu selections as you did for a Zip file, if it's a setup program, you will not see these menu selections.