Common files that can be included in a ZIP archive include PDFs, images, videos, and Microsoft Office documents including Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint (*.DOCX, *.XLSX, *.PPTX file formats). ZIP files can contain multiple files of different types. A tax accountant ZIPs and emails a copy of a person's federal and state tax returns for review before filing with the IRS.A university student ZIPs a homework assignment and related files and sends it to their instructor or professor in a classroom or online degree program.An attorney or lawyer for a law firm creates a ZIP file containing a set of related legal documents such as a will, trust, claim, or other estate planning documents.A real estate agent scans and ZIPs a sales contract and sends it to a mortgage broker for a home loan when buying a home.A car insurance agent ZIPs and emails information related to a person's health insurance, homeowner's insurance, auto insurance, or life insurance policy.Here are some specified real-world examples of actual usage of ZIP files: ZIP files are common across a variety of business areas, including industries ranging from medical, insurance, legal, mortgage, banking and financial, scientific, equities and trading, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and education industries. ZIP files are commonly found as both Gmail attachments and Google Drive, as well as other cloud-based storage systems such as Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive. Today, the ZIP file format is widely supported, with billions of such files in circulation. The receiver of a a ZIP file would then use a decompression program to extract, or 'unzip,' the file contents onto a user's computer. It also allowed for multiple files and folders to be grouped together ('zipped') and transferred as a single ZIP file. Using ZIP compression often saved minutes or even hours off of file transfers.

At that time, file transfer speeds were much slower than today. The ZIP file format dates to the late 1980s when it received heavy use in pre-internet-era Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes). The ZIP file format is very popular for efficiently storing and transferring groups of files in a variety of business and personal applications. ZIP files group together one or more files into a single file, called an archive, while at the same time compressing them and making them smaller.

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