Review by Terry

I’ve used WinZip for years as a shareware application and I love it. Corel purchased WinZip in 2006 and has steadily added more file formats as well as a host of extra features.

I had no problems with installation. Registration was easy too but note that Corel asks you for your email address, company name and your physical address in order to complete registration. I entered only my email address and it registered just fine so you really don’t have to provide any more information than that. The activation code is located underneath the CD in the CD case.

The EULA (End User License Agreement) allows you to have WinZip 18 Pro installed on one computer at any given time. You can install it on another computer, but only if you delete it from any other computer you previously installed it on. This is not the standard 3-computer license.

WinZip 18 pro will, of course, compress and decompress files into a portable, reasonable file size. This version can compress and decompress over 25 different file formats. It will also encrypt and decrypt sensitive data, convert documents to .PDFs (even read-only .PDFs), perform back-ups and even automatically burn them to CD/DVD/Blu-Ray, embed watermarks into photos and documents, view images in a zipped file without extracting them, rotate/resize/view images at full size from within a Zip file, and a ton of other helpful capabilities. The big news about version 18 is its cloud services integration. You can use direct access to cloud services, including Box, Google Drive, SkyDrive, Dropbox, CloudMe and SugarSync, to open zip files saved in the cloud, zip files before you upload or select files from the cloud to zip and share. It’s also optimized for social networking sites like FaceBook. Go to the WinZip website for a complete outline of what this version has to offer.

So why the 3 stars? My problem is that you can perform all these tasks with currently available, shareware programs for free - including compressing and decompressing files. OK, so Corel has put all these capabilities into one convenient package, but the average user will never use most of the additional features. They want to zip and unzip files. At the current price of almost $60, it’s more product than the average user needs at a premium price.