I love my mac. For years, I resisted the urge to buy one, but once I stepped over the edge, it became love at first keystroke. Since then, I have become a big fan of Apple products, although I confess, I’m not an exclusive follower of the cult of mac.

My theology is to use what is best for each individual need. Because of that, I have a notebook with Leopard—-and a desktop running Vista. I love my iPod, but my phone of choice is a Blackberry. Technology is supposed to make my life easier, and as long as it gets the job done, it really is unimportant to me what brand is on the device.

Still, there are some things that simply work better on a mac than a PC. From time to time, I plan to share a few tips that I’ve learned over the years in occasional Mac 101 posts.

Mac 101: How to Create Zip (Compressed) Files in OS X

Have you ever needed to send multiple documents or images in an email and didn’t want to attach every single file? Today I needed to send some images and instead of going through the pain of attaching every high-res shot, I simply created a zipped archive. It took two seconds and saved me the hassle of attaching every file.

Here is how to do it:

1. Navigate to the files you want to compress in Finder.

2. Select the files using Command-A for all the ones in a folder, or simply hold down the command button and click the individual files.

3. Next, Command-Click on one of the files and click Compress __ items. In some versions of OS X, it will say Create Archive of __ items.

4. You will now see a file called Archive.zip.

5. That’s it! You can also compress whole directories by command-clicking on the folder name.