I am using a MAC at the office to finish off a chapter due either this evening or early tmrw morning. It is a huge document, around 70 pages, and has pictures so it needs to be made smaller. I would normally use WINZIP, but I can't find it on this MAC..... can any Mac users guide me through the process of shrinking a file size? or guide me to somewhere I might be able to find out on the internet. not having much luck with help sites because I am unsure of mac terminology...

Good God, I hate Macs and the people who rave about them. I'd rather join a religious cult than the Cult of Mac. Anyway, Chrisrolinski, try this site: http://www.nippyzip.com/

You can zip your files instantly online and then e-mail them back to yourself or anyone else, instantly.

You should normally be able to select the file/folder you want to compress, then select "Compress" from the "File" menu on the desktop. Easy peasy.

Is that something on Snow Leopard maybe? Or did you download an app or plugin of some kind? I've never seen that on Mac and have been using them for more than 15 years!

I use Stuffit Expander. The version to decompress stuff only is free. The one to compress/zip is not, but you can try it for free, although I think I've been tld you need to enter card details (it's at http://www.stuffit.com/mac/expander.html).

Sourceforge seems to have a couple of programmes - you should check them out. Those are totally free and I've always found things of Sourceforge to be excellent and work perferctly on my Macs. Look at http://sourceforge.net/ If accessing from your Mac, it will display the page you are looking for straight away.

The online thing suggested below looks very interesting though, I suppose it all depends on the speed of your internet connection and the speed at which it compresses - I'll personally give it a go :)

No it's been on MacOS X for quite a few years. Apologies the "File" command on older Macs may be "Create archive" (just dug out my 10.3 Panther? laptop to check). But it's definitely there, and has been there for quite some time.

I used to use ZipIt myself, before this was added. But now I just use the command in the file menu. I've been using Macs for 20 years :)

Whaooo BilboBaggins, thanks so much for that.

It is 'create archive' on mine. Can't believe I'd never seen it! Surely it's going to make my life easier at a point.

:)

Thanks for all your helpful replies! I am formatting the footnotes now, and will attempt this in a couple of hours. I shall report back as to which technique worked! :)

No. Both Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) and Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) have built-in zip archive utility. To compress your files right click (if you're on a mac laptop tap with two fingers at the same time to get "right" click) and choose "archive" if you're using Tiger, and "compress" if you're using Leopard.

Hi Montezuma :)

Perhaps you'll have seen that I figured it out earlier... but it's really good to know it's not THAT old... well, in the grand scheme of things... and I've not been using Tiger for that long, I typically got it just before the release of Leopard pretty much - so I can forgive myself, lol.

Thanks for all your help. I followed the instructions for compressing and it did, but the smallest I could get it was 40MB which is too way big for my sups inbox without making him angry! In fact it wouldn't even allow me to add it as an attachment. Instead I just removed the 3 offending high resolution images and will have to find a way of compressing those when it comes to addind them to the document and printing it in a few months.

I am not a direct user of Mac but I am a bit familiar as some from my family use Macs. As far as I know there is no MS office picture manager in the Macs. You can e-mail the pictures to yourself. On the mail window there should be a list for the image size option and choose the resolution to compress them.

I think i have used stuffit (or its called something really similar) to zip files before - im sure its free or you can get a trial version

For the images, if you can reduce the quality for now, I thought maybe you've got Photoshop on your Mac? Or somewhere on campus? (Sounds silly but most of the Macs I've used in unis had pretty much all the Adobe suites I can think of on them, expect for Audition).

With Photoshop (or an equivalent anyway) you can actually decide of the exact size of your pictures, really. Just make a copy of them for safety and work from the duplicates. Open them with Photoshop, then click File (I think) > Save as. You can change the format, some are more size efficient than others (eg .gif) and even for jpeg you can decide of the quality you want on a scale 1 to 12. This makes a significant difference in size in the end.