Just wondering (cause I am not comfortable with commands yet) if there was a GUI program that would do it for me. So if I download a .gz .tar I could run the program and have it unzipped/untarred automatically?

Thanks.

yes, you should be safe right clicking on the file and pressing extract
if not, the app is called file roller

I know the cli is a little scary at first but one you get used to it you will probably like it better for most tasks.

zip:
To make a zip file
zip myFiles.zip file1.doc file2.txt file3.txt file4.html (and so on)
To unzip
unzip myFiles.zip

There are a lot more options but this is enough to get you started

As for tar:
tar -cvf myTar.tar file1.doc file2.txt file3.txt file4.html (and so on)
(you can also do this for entire directories)
tar -cvf myTar.tar myDirectory/

To untar:
tar -xvf myTar.tar

You can also get more complicated with tar and gzip your tars:
tar -zcvf myTar.tar.gz myDirectory/

and to untar a gzip file:
tar -zxvf myTar.tar.gz

How I explained this clearly

Later