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how is this non standard?

pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908775/xcu/tar.html

Try it on solaris or openbsd you will find out quickly.

true, it may have been standard then, but you must admit that solaris is really outdated. can't comment on bsd, though.
I'm basically saying that you guys do have a point, but I really wouldn't go and say that tar -zcvf is not a standard command today. hell, that line is in the official redhat learning materials

That's not what "standard" means. Just remember that you only know GNU tar, then.
Using tar and gzip is as simple, anyway.
I bet you use #!/bin/env bash in your scripts.

I can handle old stuff, I'm just not used to it. I remember being surprised multiple times when utilities I'm familiar with suddenly lack flags I'm used to on linux.
but yeah... you're right about the GNU tar thing.
#!/bin/bash only

I was hoping one of yall would help me out and explain the commands to me; yes it might be basic for you guys but i was hoping with would be a learning opportunity for me

fine, I'll bite

tar -zcvf reportbackup.tar.gz ~/report/
-z - use gzip/zip for compression. tar itself doesn't compress
-c - create a new archive (new file)
-v - verbose, so you know what's it doing
-f - output file. in this case it's reportbackup.tar.gz
~/report/ - source directory which will be compressed

thanks for the help, but now can you explain how i would uncompress this now? I just so i know

tar -xzf reportbackup.tar.gz -C /tmp/reports
-x - extract
-z - it's a zip archive, so use gzip/zip
-f - file to extract. in this case it's reportbackup.tar.gz
-C - output directory. in this case it's /tmp/reports. but the -C flag is optional. if omitted, it will extract to your current working directory