As of today Dropbox has no feature yet to enable you to unzip files. All you can do to unzip archive files in a ZIP format is by downloading them first and use archive extractor installed on your computer. What if you are working with different computer from the computer you usually use on your daily basis? While the computer has no archive extractor installed?
You can take advantage of an online archive extractor called extract.me. It’s pretty cool tool that allows you to extract a number of archive file formats, including ZIP. There are about 70 archive file formats that are supported by this tool. Extract.me has the capability to extract password-protected archives. However, this tool still has some lacks. It doesn’t extract the archive files directly on Dropbox dashboard. Instead, you have to visit its website in order to be able using it. It also offers no feature to directly upload the extracted files back to Dropbox.
At least you can rely on it every time you need to extract ZIP files from Dropbox from a computer that has no archive extractor installed. So, here is how to use the tool.
- Visit the website of extract.me and choose the Dropbox link beneath the Choose file button.
- On the appearing pop-up, login with your Dropbox account.
- Select a ZIP file you want to extract the click the Choose button.
- Choose on the individual files you want to download to your computer.
Note:
If you experience a problem, try to switch to different web browser. I use Google Chrome in this tutorial and everything went well. But, when I tried to unzip files using Firefox Quantum extract.me did’t work the way it should be.