Adding Files to an Archive

New users: for introductory information, please see the section Brief Tutorial - Adding Files to an Archive.

This section describes the Add dialog box. There are other ways to add files to an archive:

• The drag and drop interface.
• The Explorer interface.

The Add dialog box

To open the Add dialog box, click on the Add button on the toolbar or select the Add entry from the Actions pull-down menu to bring up the Add dialog box.

You can select the files you want to add in several ways:

• Click on the desired files in the list near the top of the Add dialog box. You can select multiple files using normal Windows file selection conventions (for example, hold down the Shift key while clicking to select multiple files). Then press the Add button.
• Type the name(s) of the files you want to add. If you specify multiple filenames, each filename must be enclosed in double quotes. Then press the Add button.
• To add files with wildcards (for example, "*.doc" to add all files with an extension of .doc), type the filename with wildcards in the File name edit field, then press the Add with wildcards button. Standard wildcards are accepted.

See Add Dialog Box Options for a description of the options available in this dialog box.

Compatibility note

Beginning with version 9.0, WinZip® supports the 64-bit extensions to the Zip file format. The extended format lets you store all the data you need in Zip files of virtually unlimited size.

The original Zip file format limited the number of member files in a Zip file to 65,535, and the maximum size of both the Zip file itself and any member file to 4 gigabytes. For all practical purposes, the 64-bit extended format eliminates all these restrictions: member file size, Zip file size, and number of member files are limited only by your system's resources.

WinZip remains fully compatible with the original file format and uses the original format whenever possible. WinZip uses the 64-bit extended format only when the limits of the original format are exceeded.

You should be aware, however, that very large Zip files compressed with WinZip 9.0 are not compatible with earlier versions of WinZip and may not be compatible with other Zip file utilities.