If you’ve been using Windows for a while, you’ve undoubtedly come across zip files. ZIP is a type of archive file format that Windows 11 natively supports. Back in the day, ZIP was the go-to archive type for compressing files. But since it has Windows support, you can still come across it quite often even today.

Here you will find everything you need to know about ZIP files, how to open them in Windows 11, and solutions to problems related to them.

ZIP is a widely used file archive format that allows users to compress large files and share them as a single file of smaller size without losing data. Although the ZIP file format was made public in 1989, it became part of Microsoft's software utilities starting with Windows 7.

But ZIP is not the only popular archive file format out there. There are dozens of such archive file formats, such as RAR, TAR, 7z, etc., and many of them have their own proprietary ones. This is the main reason why ZIP enjoys native Windows support, while others require special third-party applications to open them. This means that you can use built-in tools to zip or unzip files and open them as easily as you would any other file/folder on Windows.