Chrome Story

Chromebooks can handle most of the compressed file formats without extensions or apps. That’ll take care of most of your needs. But if you need some additional features, there are always some extensions and apps. This tutorial explains all of those options in detail.

Supported Compressed File Formats

First, let’s take a look at the file formats supported by Chrome OS.

• .zip
• .rar
• .tar
• .tar.gz (.tgz)
• .tar.bz2 (.tbz2)

Extracting Zipped Files Without an Extension or App

There is a slight problem here. Chrome OS actually does not extract zip files, at least yet. It allows you to open them, just like you open a USB drive or a memory card, and access files and folders inside.

To open a zip file, double click the file. You will see it open as a new tab on the Files app. Here is how it looks:

You will see the contents of the zip file listed on the Files app. You can copy paste or move files to the Downloads folder or Google Drive within the app.

Extracting Files on Google Drive

We can do this with the help of an extension. ZIP Extractor allows you to unzip (extract or decompress) files in Google Drive. According to the developer:

* The ZIP file can come from your computer or from Google Drive.
* You can choose which files in the ZIP file to extract.
* After extracting the ZIP file, you can share the extracted files with others

You can install the app from here.

As you can see, managing zip files on a Chromebook is not fully functional yet. Not at least as much as we expect it to. But, I am sure Google or the development community will soon come up with a better Chrome Packaged App that handles zip files better. But the ideal scenario will be adding zip file management functionality directly to the Files app.