Windows 7 : Managing Print Jobs (part 3) - Creating XPS Documents

5. Creating XPS Documents

As an alternative to printing on paper, you can print to an XPS document. The XPS document will look exactly like the printed document will look, but it will be a file rather than a sheet of paper. You can then e-mail that XPS document to other people. Or, if you have a Web site, let people download it from your site.

You can also use this technique to print other people's Web pages to files on your own hard disk. You can view that file at any time; you don't need to be online.

To print to an XPS document, start printing as you normally would. For example, choose File => Print from the program's menu bar. Or if you're in Internet Explorer, click the Print toolbar button. When the Print dialog box opens, choose Microsoft XPS Document Writer instead of your usual printer, as in Figure 8. Then click OK or Print.

Figure 8. Print an XPS document.

Because you're printing to a file, a Save As dialog box will open. There you can choose the folder in which you want to place the file, and give the file a name. Figure 9 shows an example where I'm about to print to a file named Budget 2010.xps in my Documents folder. Click Save.

Figure 9. Printing Budget 2010.xps in the Documents folder.

Figure 10. Icon for an XPS document.

The Save As dialog box closes. To verify that the document was printed to a file, open the folder you printed to. The file is closed so it will look like an icon (see Figure 10), but you can treat it as any other document. For example, double-click the icon to open it. Or, if you want to e-mail it to someone using Windows Live Mail, right-click the icon and choose Send To => Mail Recipient.