This post is presented by Trend Micro, maker of Dr. Unarchiver.

Archives are a great way to compress and bundle all sorts of files. Whether massive applications or complex media projects, to get at the contents of an archive you typically must unarchive the whole thing. Depending on the type of archive, you might need special software. And depending on who sent it, you might not trust the files in the archive. Like a vampire, some malware requires you invite it into your machine.

This makes Dr. Unarchiver an interesting app, presenting new ways to work with archives.

On the one hand, Dr. Unarchiver is a fast and flexible unarchiver. It’s compatible with all the common formats: RAR, ZIP, 7z, BZIP2, GZIP and a bunch of other unpronounceable acronyms.*

But where Dr. Unarchiver really shines is in its ability to browse the contents of archived files before opening. Additionally, you can open files straight from the archives, before they’ve been decompressed. It’s like having a window into the archive — a way to work with the archive’s contents without actually opening it.

Dr. Unarchiver: A handy, free Mac archive utility

There are a lot of ways to imagine how this might save time. If you receive a folder full of images, for example, you can preview the pictures from inside the archived folder. Rather than unarchiving the entire collection, you can simply select the one you want and open it.

Of course, you can also extract the files as usual. It’s a simple and straightforward process. Right-click the compressed file, and Dr. Unarchiver extracts the contents to the current folder. (Or you can select a folder as the destination.)

To browse the contents of an archive, just drag and drop it into Dr. Unarchiver’s main console.

There’s also virus detection built into the app. So when you receive an archive, you can verify the contents and make sure the archive is safe before opening it. Try that with OS X’s regular unarchiver feature.

If you work with large or complex bundles of files, you probably deal with archives. If so, check out Dr. Unarchiver. It’s got a five-star rating on the Mac App Store, and it’s totally free.

* According to Dr. Unarchiver’s Mac App Store listing, the software works with the following file types: RAR, 7z, ZIP, XZ, BZIP2, GZIP, RAR, WIM, ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, CramFS, DEB, DMG, FAT, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MBR, MSI, NSIS, NTFS, RPM, SquashFS, UDF, VHD, WIM, XAR and Z.