How To Unzip Files On Windows

So you're buddy over in marketing e-mailed you a collection of funny cat photo and you excitedly fire up Outlook to open up the e-mail. To your dissappoint, all you see is an attachment called "cats-are-awesome.zip"!

Fear not, we will have to browsing through those feline photos in no time.

Zip files are a way to package and compress files for easy storage and distribution. Below we outline various methods for opening zip files in Windows.

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Zip Extractor Online

Unzip files with Windows File Explorer

Luckily Windows comes with its own built-in decompression utility, so no need to install any 3rd party software for a simple file decompression.

Open up File Explorer and locate the file you wish to decompress. The file type should be "Compressed (zipped) folder".
Double click the file to extract it to current directory
If you wish to extract to a different directory, right click the file. Then select "Extract all..."
Select the directory and click "Extract"

How to unzip in Windows using WinRAR

Follow these steps if you are not comfortable with the inbuilt Windows unzip program. We will use third party software called WinRAR.

Before starting, make sure that you have downloaded and installed WinRAR in your PC.

Locate the files which you want to extract.
Select the files if you want to extract multiple files.
Else if there is a single file, right click on it. And skip step 2.
After selecting files, and right clicking, you will see a menu, from that menu, click on any of the following option.

Extract Here: It will extract files in the same directory as of the zip file.

Extract to “filename”: It will extract the files in a folder having the same name as of the zip file.

If you want to extract selective files using WinRAR, open the zip using WinRAR, select files, and click on Extract from the top menu bar.

How to Unzip in windows using WinZip

Make sure you have WinZip installed in your PC. If not, go download from here and install before the steps.

Open WinZip, and click on File->Open.
Choose desired file with zip extension.
Select all or multiple files from the contents within the zip.
Click on Unzip to. Navigate to location where you want to extract. You can also extract on cloud storage.
Click Unzip. And you are done.