Do any of Microsoft Office for Mac packages offer inbuilt virtual printer?

Apple's printing to PDF is an amazing, but I wonder if MS offers a virtual printer service to generate XPS. Please note that the question is specific to the Microsoft Office products, not printing to file in general on macOS.

As Windows users may know, Microsoft Office for Windows package often preinstalls (at least for legacy OSs) the virtual XPS printer driver allowing for "print-to-PDF"-like functionality.

Does any of Microsoft Office for Mac packages (whether old or current) offer inbuilt printing to XPS, PDF or anything else without using the macOS print to PDF feature?


Printing to PDF is a feature built-in to macOS and as such is not something that requires special support from each individual application like on Windows.

When you have Microsoft Office installed, you can click Print to open up the standard macOS print dialog. On the bottom left you'll find a drop-down button "PDF" that allows you to save to PDF, save to Postscript and sharing with various services including email.

You do not need to have any kind of "virtual XPS printer driver" installed for this to work.

There's no "virtual XPS printer driver" for Microsoft Office on Mac. The current Microsoft Office does not support saving or exporting to XPS.

As a format, XPS itself is also not supported by built-in macOS apps such as for example Preview.app for viewing. You can get a number of different third-party XPS viewers on the App Store though.


When doing my research, I stumbled this article on XPS on Library of Congress Website. The article describes XPS format, namely saying this,

The expectations for XPS as a fixed-layout document format for sharing with end users was less successful. Support for the XPS format was never integrated into Apple's operating systems. For Mac OS X 10.0, released in March 2001, Apple had chosen to develop its own code associated with PDF (based on PDF version 1.3 ...

Mac OS X came with the Preview application, which was a PDF Viewer, and users could print to PDF. See Mac OS X and PDF: The Real Story by Leonard Rosenthol. Although XPS viewers were developed for Mac OS X by third parties, there was little reason for Mac users to acquire them.

There is no indication either Apple or MS Office should ever give direct support to XPS printing