Old habits die hard. Whenever we have to send huge attachments; the wise ones used to say ‘Don’t clog their mailbox, zip it and send it’. Everyone religiously used to follow the rule and every word document, presentation or excel sheet was zipped before sending. The zipped file would be a good 40% smaller. The mails would reach faster and everyone would be happy in the process.
Fast forward to 2009, most people now use Office 2007. The new Office is vastly more ….well…new and the preferred file formats all have changed. There is a x at the end of the all filenames so we have .docx, .pptx and .xlsx floating all over the place (how do you pronounce these anyways?!). The documents are still religiously sent as zipped files. Except there is no 40% reduction. Actually it isn’t even 10%. Why?
Because you cannot zip a file that’s already zipped. Yep…. all the new office documents are already zipped anyways. You can even open them using Winzip by simply renaming their extensions to .zip.
So folks, next time you mail someone, don’t bother to zip it. There is only the added annoyance of the recipient having to unzip before opening the file.
