Practical guides on getting data out of files — PDFs, images, archives and Windows installers — from the people who build the free tools.
A .gz file is a single file compressed with gzip — commonly a server log, SQL database dump, JSON export, or CSV snapshot — and the fastest way to open one is to drop…
Read the guide →A photo of your signature has a white paper background baked in — drop it onto a document or email and you get a white box that sits on top of everything, looking nothing…
Read the guide →The key difference is that these formats split the job of “archiving” (bundling many files into one) and “compression” (making it smaller) differently: ZIP does both together, TAR only bundles, GZ only compresses a…
Read the guide →A ZIP that won’t open is almost always one of five things: an incomplete or interrupted download, a file that was renamed to .zip but isn’t actually a ZIP, a password-protected archive, a multi-part…
Read the guide →An MSI file is not a plain archive like a ZIP — it’s a Windows Installer database. Under the hood it’s a Compound File Binary (the same container format as an old .msg), and…
Read the guide →Colour palette extraction takes an image that may contain tens of thousands of distinct colours and reduces it to a small set of representative ones by grouping similar colours together — a process called…
Read the guide →Most photos carry EXIF metadata — a block of hidden information written by the camera or phone that can include the exact date and time, the camera and lens, the settings, and often the…
Read the guide →Google Docs doesn’t offer a clean “save image” for pictures in a document — right-clicking gives limited options and often a downscaled copy. The reliable way to get every image at full quality is…
Read the guide →A .docx file is a ZIP archive of XML parts. The actual text lives in word/document.xml, stored as a tree of paragraphs and “runs” of characters; images sit in word/media/, and formatting is kept…
Read the guide →Word, Excel and PowerPoint files store hidden metadata in two XML parts inside the file — docProps/core.xml and docProps/app.xml — including the author, the company, the name of everyone who last saved it, the…
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