Everybody likes to add pictures to their documents (sometimes to their detriment, but that’s a different article). However, the file sizes on these pictures can add up, and before you know it your 10 page document is 10 MB (megabytes). This causes problems not only for you, but for your audience as well. One example of this occurs with emailing the documents. Many times documents are emailed to their intended audience. Unfortunately, a document of that size could cause problems with their email systems.

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Today, email is one of the prime means of communication at the workplace. Consequently, it can be disastrous if you don’t have access to it. How could this happen? The answer is simple: you go over the size limit on your account. This usually leads to you not being able to receive or send email until the size of your account goes back under the limit. What could cause this? The usual culprit here is large file attachments. This is why it is so essential to Zip your attachments before sending out your email.

Zip refers to a process by which you can compress files into a smaller archive, sometimes cutting the size of contents of the Zip File in half. For example, if I had two Microsoft Word documents and a Microsoft Excel document that I was going to send out to my team, I would add all three to a Zip File then attach this file to the email instead of attaching the three documents separately.

This has the following advantages:

• As stated above, this will usually drastically decrease the size of the email. This is especially true in documents that may contain a lot of pictures, charts, or process flows (such as process flows from Microsoft Visio). As a rule of thumb, I Zip any document that is half a Megabyte or more (this might show as 500kb as the file size, which is the size in Kilobytes).

• This will also keep groups of documents better organized. In the above example, this would allow the audience to keep track of one file instead of three. Also, if you were to have multiple groups of documents in an email, you could Zip each group.

• A smaller email will obviously download faster, so if you Zip your attachments your audience will appreciate the fact that didn’t have to sit there staring at their Inbox for 10 minutes while your message downloaded. You don’t always know the connection speeds of your clients, so this can be a big deal for those on dial-up connections.

The argument some people make for not zipping their files is that their email accounts have a very large size limit (which is pretty true today across the board). However, when sending attachments, you must also take into account the audience you’re sending it to. Much like their connection speed, you don’t always know how their email is configured, and it probably isn’t a good idea to kill their account because you sent unzipped attachments.

Now that you’re ready to Zip your attachments, how do you do it? This is another easy answer. In order to Zip a file, you can use any number of free programs out there. The program I use is called WinZip. You must purchase this software, but I also believe that windows has a native utility to Zip files, although I have not used it. If you do a search on “free zip programs”, you should get plenty of options.

In the end, it takes very little time to Zip your attachments, and the benefits explained above are well worth it.