For introductory information, please see the section entitled “Brief Tutorial - Creating a New Archive”.

There are several ways you can create New Archive:

From PowerArchiver window, clicking on “File> New” or “New” button on the toolbar.

Directly from Windows Explorer, using PowerArchiver's Explorer Shell Extensions.

To create a new archive, click on “New Archive” from the PowerArchiver's toolbar.

This activates the New Archive dialog box. Type the name of the archive that you want to create. This dialog box works much like the standard Windows Save dialog box. The names of any existing archives on the selected drive and folder will be listed to help you choose a name that is not already in use.

From the “Save as type” combo box, you can choose between these archive formats: ZIP, PA, 7-Zip, CAB, LHA (LHA), TAR, ISO, BH (BlakHole) or PowerArchiver Auto-Backup Script.

If you want to create a TAR.GZ or TAR.BZ2 archive, you must first choose TAR when creating a new file and later while selecting files to add, select “GZIPed TAR” or “BZIPed TAR” under compression methods.

We definitely recommend using ZIP compression in most cases. It is quite fast and many users already have ZIP compatible programs that can open zip files. Newer Windows versions (WinME, Win2000, WinXP, Win2003, Vista, Windows 7/8/10 etc.) support ZIP and CAB compression out of the box, so if you send an ZIP or CAB file to someone, they will most likely be able to open it.

We also recommend the use of the 7-Zip format, especially if you are compressing large files, since it has the best compression out of all the formats featured in PowerArchiver. Please click here to find out more about 7-Zip: 7-Zip Compression

Advanced Codec Pack combines the best available codecs and filters into one fantastic package. Most of the codecs and filters are built by us at Conexware and we also use the best open source tools where needed. PA (.pa) format has two distinctive modes – the Optimized Strong mode that focuses on superior compression strength and Optimized Fast mode that focuses on combination of great speed and good compression strength (better than ZIP in every way). Since the PA format is still in production, only use it if you are exchanging files with someone who also uses the latest PowerArchiver version.