how can I convert an xps document into a word file

Rohn007 -- I disagree that this question was ever answered.  The initial question heading was "how can I convert an xps document into a word file?"  This is what I searched for, and this thread was one of the top results.  However, nowhere in any response is that question addressed.  Instead the user is told to not save in that format, or cut and paste from a web page into a Word document.

I, for one, would greatly appreciate if someone could either answer this question, or state that it cannot be done.  I have xps documents that I wish to convert to Word.  I am not asking how I can avoid creating xps documents in the future, I am interested in how I can convert documents that already exist into Word documents that I can edit.  In other words, my question is the same as the original poster.  I re-ask it in an effort to spur someone to actually answer it with a procedure to follow, or a statement that it can't be done.

Thanks.

Yes I agree that position is not unreasonable.  It depends on whether you focus on the subject line or the narrative (as we did).

PS: I don't mark replies. And your comment is precisely to an ongoing point I am trying to make in the forum that allowing "Moderators" mark replies WITHOUT any indication from the original poster.

As to your repeat question, convert XPS format files to Word.  Sorry**, I do not know of any easy way to do this.**

Now for a suggestion of a possible "Hard Way"

XPS is MS's equivalent to PDF. Like PDF it is intended strictly to be an e-file and print format.   Too bad that they did not make Word 2013 able to XPS like they did for PDF format.

So you are going to have perform "OCR"/Optical Character Recognition performed on the XPS file to make it editable in Word. I have not heard of any XPS specific OCR tools like there are for PDF.

So take the obvious (OK, it is only Obvious if you happen to be thinking of PDF and PDF OCR tools right at this moment <grin> ) step.  In the XPS viewer, print the XPS into PDF format.  Then use an PDF OCR tool to convert it to Word format.  Simple ...

A less simple method ...

Office comes with one tool that is designed to perform OCR on various graphic image files, including XPS (I just tested it). That is OneNote.

Open the file in the XPS reader.  From the XPS reader, print the file to OneNote.  Once it is there, you can right click on the image and select "Copy Text from this page of printout".  Paste it into onenote or Word. Clean up the pasted text.

Sorry, it is not pretty, but it does get the job done, eventually.  Don't blame me, blame MS!

Note: I did first try to insert an XPS file into OneNote, but it did not appear to work

XPS is the MS version of PDF. It is a format intended to maintain formatting when printing. To look at or print them in XP you will have to download an XPS viewer from MS (the equivalent of the Acrobat Reader for PDFs):

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/what-is-the-xps-viewer

Plus you definitely want to make sure XPS is not your default save file format as Dean pointed out.

This is a wrong reply. The question is how to convert to MS Words, NOT how to view the file.