I am sure many of you have downloaded a file and could not read it. It had a weird file extension that you did not recognize. It didn’t matter if you knew it was a compressed file format or not, you did not know how to open it. I will show you how to open or as the computer nerds say, “decompress” the most popular file compression formats using 7-zip.

7-zip is a free file archiver software program. It can open ("unzip") the following file formats…
.7z, .ZIP, .RAR, .GZIP, .BZIP2, .TAR, .ARJ, .CAB, .CHM, .CPIO, .DEB, .DMG, .HFS, .ISO, .LZH, .LZMA, .MSI, .NSIS, .RPM, .UDF, .WIM, .XAR and .Z

Besides opening up files 7-zip can also create compressed files. Compressing a file or group of files shrinks up the file sizes, sometimes significantly. Why would you want to create a compressed file you may ask? I could think of several reasons I have created compressed files, here are a few of them…
Scenario 1: You want to send some files via emailⁱ to a friend. You compress the files making them smaller in size. The benefit, the email uploads faster and your friend is able to download the email faster reducing the waiting time both ways.
Scenario 2: You have a large file that you want to upload and share with a friend. You want to decrease the file size and also chop it up into several pieces before you start uploading. The benefit, a smaller file size means faster uploading for you and faster downloading for your friend. Chopping it up into pieces will allow separate uploading and downloading of files. This will decrease the chances of a large upload or download failing, forcing you to start the full process/download over. It is also more convenient to upload or download individual files whenever you want instead of committing to one full download that may take hours or even a full day.
Scenario 3: You want to free up hard drive space. You can compress and archive your personal files to increase your hard drive space.

7-zip will compress ("zip") the following file formats…
.7z, .ZIP, .GZIP, .BZIP2 and .TAR

In the following 7-zip video tutorial I will take you step-by-step and you will easily learn the following...
1. Where to find the free program 7-zip
2. Which version of 7-zip to download and how to download it
3. Install 7-zip
4. Decompressing/Unzipping a file
5. Decompressing/Unzipping a group of files into a folder
6. How-To create a Zip file from a group of files
7. How-To use a password when zipping and unzipping files