Tom’s Tuesday Tech Tip: Legal Nurse Consultants Tell Your Attorney-Clients to Zip It or StuffIt – (Politely!)

Any Certified Legal Nurse Consultant using a computer has run into issues when trying to receive large files from an attorney-client or transferring large files from one computer to another. If you’re attached to a network, moving files is pretty easy. You just drag your file from one computer onto a shared drive and then go to the other computer and drag it off. But if you don’t have a network or shared drives, what can you do? In the good old days of AOL and unlimited file sizes on email attachments, you could just email your file and pick it up on any other computer. Today, corporate email servers have put limits on attachment file sizes in their email “gateways” to restrict the transfer of large attachments (and often the type of file also).

Let’s explore some other alternatives for the savvy Certified Legal Nurse Consultant. First, Windows^® XP ships with a built-in, but basic, utility that allows you to create smaller, compressed “.zip” files out of large uncompressed files. This works great with Word documents, photos and PDF files (but not with all files), depending upon the amount of data stored within the file.

Try this at home (safely): Use Windows Explorer to locate the Word file on your computer that you want to use (don’t open it) and right click it. When the little menu pops up, left click on Send To, then left click on Compressed (zipped) Folder. You may get a warning but click Yes. You’ll have then created a file with the same name but with a .zip extension instead of .doc or .docx extension (TechTip.zip instead of TechTip.docx). This is the “compressed” version of your file. Think of the file as having all the air squeezed out of it, the spaces taken out between the letters and the pixels pinched. If you right click on the original file and, when the little menu pops up, left click Properties, you’ll see the file size. Write it down so you won’t forget it, then do the same to the zipped file. You should notice about a 10-20% decrease in file size. In a big document, this can be significant. Zipping a file works great with any text-based file such as word processing documents and spreadsheets. It doesn’t work that well with files that are already zipped (you can’t zip a zipped file) or files that are already compressed such as some photos. One cool feature is that you can highlight a group of files and zip them all into one zip archive file.

Once you’ve zipped a file, you can then send the zip file to any Windows user via email. When they receive it, they simply save it, then right click on the file, left click Open With then left click Compressed (zipped) Folders. This will open a new Window showing the recipient what files are compressed into the zip file. The user simply clicks Extract all Files and a folder containing the unzipped files is created on the user’s computer. Even Mac users can unzip and use the files but they may need an add-in program.

Legal nurse consultants who want to step it up a notch can purchase a program called WinZip^® that gives the added flexibility to password protect your zip files (great for paranoids and others with privacy concerns). It also opens a variety of different “archive” files which makes it pretty handy. Windows XP and Vista users can get a free trial of WinZip by clicking here.

If you’ve ever received a .sit file from an attorney-client or other legal nurse consultant, you’re seeing another alternative file type. This is one that’s really useful for people who work in a combined Mac and Windows world. The .sit file type is created by a program called “StuffIt” (Mac Version or Windows Version). It does the same thing as WinZip but creates .sit or .sitx files. Free trials (Windows or Mac) are available at the StuffIt website but you have to fish around a bit to find them. There’s even a free unstuffer for the occasional user (kind of like the free unzip utility).

Whichever program you choose, they’re both good for cramming large files into small spaces and can help speed (or enable) email delivery of humongous attachments for your legal nurse consulting business. I lean to zip files because I’m a Windows user but if you interact with the occasional Mac-type you may consider StuffIt. Once you’ve got either one installed you’re free to tell your attorney-clients to zip-it or StuffIt, if you dare. Here’s to living dangerously!

Keep on techin’,

Tom