Sometimes, you may want to create zip files online, without having to use an archiving utility such as Winzip or Winrar. You may have a bunch of files in your computer or in your cloud storage accounts and you may want to archive files online and send it to someone on Facebook, Gmail or share the zip files with friends.

Often times, I have found it extremely annoying to compress and zip files online. When I switched from a Windows environment to OSX – I could not use RAR formats (osx only supports .zip or .tar or .gz formats). Moreover, I tend to rely more on online tools rather than desktop applications hence I have prepared this list of online tools which lets you upload files from your computer, pack them into zip or rar formats and then you can send the file to anyone. These tools will also be useful when you want to unpack a zip file in your computer but do not have an archiving utility installed in your system

Use Gmail To Zip Files up to 25MB

If you have images, documents, PowerPoint presentations, excel spreadsheets or any other files that you would want to convert into a zip archive format, you can use your Gmail account to do that

1. Compose a new email message and upload the documents and images as attachments.

2. Send the email to yourself.

3. When you receive the email, you will notice a link to download all the files into a ZIP file.

That’s it. You have just converted the documents and images into zip files. Now you can download these attachments or send the zipped files to anyone else via email.

Related reading – Online tools to extract, convert and send zipped files.

Use Google Drive To Zip Word Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations

Suppose you have a large number of official documents that you want to send to your friend. You cannot attach the zipped file because Gmail has a limit of 25 MB per attachment. And manually uploading files as an email attachment is certainly not an option as it will take hours to finish.

In that case, you can use Google drive to send zipped archives of up to 2 GB. Follow the steps mentioned below:

1. Open your Google Drive account, hit the “Upload” button and upload all the files and documents which you want to pack into an archive file. Please note that you can upload an entire folder in Google Drive and convert it to a ZIP file in one shot (no need to upload each file one by one).

2. When you are finished uploading, go to the “All Documents” tab and select the files you had just uploaded. Click the “More actions” button and select “Export”

3. Next, select the documents that you want to download as a zipped archive. If there are large number of documents to be converted into zipped format, you can request Gmail to email you the link when the zipping process is complete. After that, you can download all the documents as zipped archive from the download link which will be sent as a new email message.

Now, you can forward this email message to anyone as all the documents will be attached as a zip attachment. (also read: how to open excel spreadsheets without Microsoft office)

Online Utilities to Zip Files Online

Gmail and Google Drive works great but there can be situations when you may not want to use your Gmail acount for zipping and archiving files. There may be situations where you would want to use an online tool to zip files online, rather than just using Gmail.

NippyZip: NippyZip is a free online compression utility using which you can zip up to 10 files. You can email the zipped file to any email address and it works best when you are using a public computer and do not want to open your email account to do the job.

Nippyzip can compress files of size 5024 KB and you do not need to create an account or register with the site. When the compression is complete, you get an email which points you to a URL where you can download the zipped file.

Similar services: Createzipfiles.com