So I wanted to view some important documents that I had saved last year in the XPS file format. I thought Windows 10 already has XPS Viewer built inside it, but to my surprise, I could not open XPS documents in Windows 10 PC. Upon some investigation, I found out that Microsoft has decided to remove XPS Viewer from regular installations and now users have to manually install it if they need it. This is really very annoying because Microsoft was pushing XPS for many years (since Windows Vista times) and now suddenly users have to manually install it?
Anyway, there are two ways you can view XPS documents in the latest version of Windows 10 – one is to use a third-party software like Foxit PDF Reader and second is to install Microsoft XPS Viewer. You can install Microsoft XPS Viewer in Windows 10 in the following manner:
- Click on Start and then on the cogwheel icon to open Windows settings. Alternatively, you can also press the Win+I hotkey.
- In Windows settings, select Apps.
- On the Apps screen, select Apps & Features from the left side, then click/tap on Manage optional features.
- On the Manage options features screen, click on Add a feature.
- Select XPS Viewer from the list of the optional features and click on the Install button.
- Your Windows 10 PC will be ready to view XPS documents in a few seconds.
Once you have installed Microsoft XPS Viewer in your computer, you can view XPS documents by double-clicking on any of the XPS files. In the future, if you want to save the documents instead of printing them, you should choose PDF printer instead of XPS printers so that you don’t run into this problem all over again. PDF documents are versatile and can be opened by hundreds of PDF viewer applications unlike XPS documents.