Computer Tips From A Computer Guy

Add multiple tabs to Word, Excel and Powerpoint

Posted: 27 Aug 2009 03:02 AM PDT

If you use Microsoft Office a lot (I use it pretty much everyday), you might be interested in slightly increasing your efficiency when using Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. How so you might ask?

Well, OfficeTab is a nifty little program that adds tabbed document support to Microsoft Office programs. Tabbed documents in a program is really nice because it means you can view multiple Word documents in one window and switch between the documents by clicking on a different tab.

Currently, if you open two Word documents, they open in two separate instances of Word and you have to press Ctrl + Tab or click in the taskbar to switch between the two documents.

First, go to the website, which is in Chinese, and click on the download link for the program. This is a bit tricky since the entire site is in Chinese! I have taken a screenshot, so you know where to click:

Once you download it, unzip the files and run the OfficeTab setup program. Choose which Office programs you want the tabbed support to work on: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Once the installation is complete, make sure the "Run the setup center" box is checked. This will bring up the OfficeTab settings dialog where you can enable and disable the tabbed support for each program.

The program is pretty cool because you can setup keyboard shortcuts to switch between tabs, change the layout of the tabs, change the color and appearance of the tabs and even set the position of the tabs.

Click OK to save the settings and then Cancel to close out of the dialog. Now open any of your Office programs and you'll see a small area where each document has it's own tab!

Pretty neat eh!? Overall, the program works very well and is definitely worth installing if you use Office quite a bit, especially with multiple documents open at the same time. Enjoy! [via LifeHacker]