Add Tabs to Microsoft Office Applications with OfficeTab

OfficeTab is a nifty freeware made by a Chinese software developer which allows you to add tabs to Word, Excel and PowerPoint from the Microsoft Office suite.

Update: Follow-Up post answer some questions arise when using OfficeTab

To see how I achieve this click the “Read More” link below.

The free application is called OfficeTab and its compatible with both Office 2003 and Office 2007 on XP, Vista or Windows 7. As of now OfficeTab only works with Words, Excel and PowerPoint. Have a look at the screenshot below to see how OfficeTab works.

In a nut shell OfficeTab enables you to open multiple documents within one office window without cramming up your taskbar. Although Windows 7 seems to have solve this problem. You can easily switch back and forth between the document or even view them side by side within one window.

OfficeTab 1.20 is the latest stable version of this wonderful application. OfficeTab is bilingual meaning it supports both Chinese and English version of office. The developers are constantly involved with the project and update comes every couple of months. I provided the download link at the end of the article.

To install and use OfficeTab simply open the executable file and follow the instruction. I have print screened the installation procedure below.

Screenshots:

Press Next and follow the instructions on the next screen.

When you see this screen you can choose whether you want tabs in just Words, PowerPoint, Excel or all three of them.

Follow the prompt till you’ll get to the end of the installation. Then a window will popup listing out all the settings you can change. You can leave it as default if you want, you’ll be able to change the settings later on.

Just press apply and then press cancel to continue.

Once your done, open up one of the Office Applications (Word, Excel or Powerpoint). Create two new documents to see OfficeTab working its magic.

You can even split the documents inside one word window displaying them side by side.

Did I mention that OfficeTab is very light on system resources.

To conclude, if you have being look for a simply way to add tabs to Words, Excel or PowerPoint; OfficeTab is the perfect solution (and probably the only solution right now) to your need. Its simple to setup and use, not to mention the light memory usage. I recommend you all to try it out, let me know how it goes with your machine.

Download Link: [OfficeTab 1.20]
Link: [OfficeTab Official Website]

kevin @ Double Glazing Sutton

Some tabs, called Contextual Tabs, appear only when certain objects are selected. Contextual Tabs expose functionality specific only to the object with focus. For example, selecting a picture brings up the Pictures tab, which presents options for dealing with the picture. Similarly, focusing on a table exposes table-related options in a specific tab. Contextual Tabs remain hidden except when an applicable object is selected.

This can have the effect of frustrating users who fail to find functions in the ribbon due to not knowing that the object must be selected first. Contextual menus violate one of the most basic principles of user interface design--software must not assume that the user knows the answer before giving the user access to the answer. Command line interfaces gave way to menu interfaces in the mid-1980's precisely because menu interfaces give the user a plainly-visible list of options, from which the user can choose, without having to know a priori what the options are. (Older command line interfaces required a user to know magic keywords to type in order to do anything, where menu interfaces gave the user a ready mnemonic.) Contextual interfaces reflect an unlearning of basic psychology: users cannot take actions that they don't know exist. If an icon or menu item is hidden, then users often don't even know where to look to find the item.

The most perverse and sadistic thing about contextual menus is that they come into play at exactly the worst time. When a user is looking for an infrequently used feature, that feature is the one that is most likely to be hidden.

Thought this might help :-)

wangmingbai

hi

I have updated this software to new version, you can find it from my website http://www.officedocumenttab.com/.

If you have questions and suggestions, you can post it to my website. I will be there.
regards

Dont pay

No way.

Try to charge $65 for the program now????

What do you think we are, fools?

You'll disappear same way you went famous...

Kelly

$65? No, I came to the official web site just now, it is only $25. Saving lots of space on taskbar, may not waste of our $25. I will try this software.

Henry

What a great idea, but too bad the program wasn't created by someone who knows what their doing ----- or do they??

I've read nearly 100 posts in different websites and there are just too many problems associated with this program than what it's worth. I've learned to read as much as I can before making the decision to use some flaky 3rd party software.

I hope someone at Microsoft is listening to the people who want this feature. They can build an application for all of Office applications and do it right. I'd even pay a nominal fee for this.

Good luck to all --- those who say it works (it's a ticking time-bomb) and for those who've uninstalled it (what nasties have been left on your computer).

Johan

hope someone will be able to assist me, we currently have Office 2003 installed on our XP pc. When we highlight a word and add a comment to that and then print the document, it prints the highlighted word. We used to work on office 97 and had no such trouble. We do not find any settings in which we can turn it off. Please help. JPB

Ben

Hi Johan

I don't think there are any settings that prevent you from printing out highlighted texts. The only workaround I can come up with is to just select all the text (Ctrl+A) and then remove the highlighted color manually. After your done you can just press (Ctrl+Z) to get the highlighted texts back.

Cleaners Croydon

Thanks so much for this i have been trying to do this for ages, thanks for the help.

Lee

Juan

Thanks Sam! I was having the same problem after uninstall OfficeTab all documents are opening in the same window (and without tabs this was annoying).

Shin

Hi guys,

I found a solution to the Taskbar problem.

After uninstallation of OfficeTab, go to Tools > Options > View > Show and check "Windows in Taskbar" in Word. Then you can see multiple windows separately in the Taskbar as usual.

By default, the show option should be checked on but the installation of OfficeTab seems to check it off.

My Word is 2003.

I hope this works well in your word too.

Ben

thanks mate :) we needed that for word 2003. I'll be adding it to the word Office Follow Up post.

Abu Aufa's Weblog

Nice info.. thanks..
.-= Abu Aufa's Weblog´s last blog ..Tips agar blog baru cepat dikenal =-.

Al

Hi,

I had the same problem as Sam and thanks to him/his solution solved it. I uninstalled Officetab also because, when closing Word I had next message:

Run-time error '5',
so I needed to close the message and only then Word.
Now, after uninstalling with Revo Uninstaller, cleaning with CCleaner and Tune Up Utilities, including search and deleting Officetab in registries, there is still in Word-Tools Show Tabbar and WordTAb lines, I believe I can live with it. Otherwise, very nice program

lars

Im having the same issue as Sergiy posted, getting the type mismatch 13 error.
It works in Excel tho, so Im not sure why its broken in Word.

I use Office 2007, sp2, english version with Norwegian languagapack ontop. Might have something to do with it?

Corey

Sorry, I didn't think Sam's posts was dealing with the same issue.
No Matter, the "Show all windows in the taskbar" option was already unticked.
so I ticked it
re-started word,
then unticked it again,
then re-started word again to see if this would fix it, and i'm sad to say it didn't.

You know..., I Love the word tab feature, and would love to get it working again.
Thank you so much for taking the time to troubleshoot this with me!
I write quite a bit, and this is gonna be invaluable to me!
I say gonna because I am confident that we will figure it out :)
Corey

Corey

Hi, I have installed office tab and opened word and everything worked wonderful! Then when I closed word and re-opened it, there was nothing. I could not get the add on to work again. Huh? Any idea what might be going on Ben?

Thanks!

Corey

Ben

Hi Corey

This solution is from sam's comment above.

Try going to Go to Word Options > Advanced > Section: Display > Untick Show all windows in the taskbar

Restart words and see if it works. Let me know how it goes.

Sam

Solution!

Sorry, I don't want to take over this blog. I just did some investigating and came up with this:

1. My problem from my previous post can be fixed this way (in Word 2007);
Go to Word Options > Advanced > Section: Display > Show all windows in the taskbar
klick this and you can see all your documents again.

2. Alternatively manage several open windows by doing this:
In the menu bar click on View > Switch windows
... and you'll get to see all docs that are currently open.

3. If you don't want to see a seperate icon for each document on the taskbar:
Undo #1 (see above) AND just toggle between all open documents by using the keyboard shortcut CTRL+F6

I'm glad I went through this process, because now I know my Word better (always a good thing!) and found that I don't need to clog up my screen with tabs when I can just use a keyboard toggle command.

Hope I could help somebody else! :-)

Ben

Very nice find Sam. After trying uninstalling OfficeTab I have to admit it does leave behind a rather awkward bug.

I'm sure the solutions you provided above will help out a lot of people. I'll add it to the followup post. =]

Sam

Addendum: I only now realized that the app has left an undesirable legacy and would like to warn others.

After uninstalling the app, I can now have two documents open in word (btw, it's word 2007) without knowing it. (I juggle a lot of documents at any given time, so it's easy to lose track.)

In other words: There is no indication that I have more than one doc open - not within word, not in the toolbar.

Only when I chose 'View' > 'Arrange all' am I able to see all open documents and access them (to e.g. close them).

This is a rather annoying bug - if anybody has an idea how to change this back to the normal behavior (= every document has a toolbar icon), please do so. Thank you!

Sam

I wish I knew Chinese - I have an important feedback for the programmer.

I *loved* the tabs and the option to have two docs displayed in one window -- until I realized that it interferes with the commenting function. (I'm an editor and I need to write lots of comments.)

What happened: I was able to mark the text and add a comment, but when I tried to access the reviewing pane to actually write the text of the comment, I could not get the cursor into it. Whenever I started typing, the text appeared visible, inside the original text, next to the highlight indicating the comment.

I also noticed that the color of my comments had changed - it was set to blue, now it was pink.

I disabled the tabs and also tried all kinds of different settings, but was unable to get my comment function back. Sadly, I had to finally uninstall the little app.

I would appreciate if somebody could convey this feedback to the programmer. I'll keep an eye open for an updated version, as I found it extremely useful.

Thank you!

Sergiy

Already 2 hours I try to leave next message and I can't.

I checked also on other computer with Windows XP (there are Microsoft .NET Framework 2,5, 3.0, 3,5 on it). The same problem: no tabs and this message: http://pic.ipicture.ru/uploads/090825/8yrmWBEeC...
It's OK. Never mind.

Ben

Hi sorry for the late reply.

I have no idea what the problem is I tried on all of my computers they all seen to work fine. As of now I could only assume that Officetab does not support Russian version of Office 2007. Your comment are not showing up because you replied 5 times conceutively, my spam filter is picking you up as spam. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Sergiy

I checked also on other computer with Windows XP (there are Microsoft .NET Framework 2,5, 3.0, 3,5 on it). The same problem: no tabs and this message: http://pic.ipicture.ru/uploads/090825/8yrmWBEeC...
It's OK. Never mind.

Sergiy

First time I changed some defolt settings for Word. Then I completely uninstalled program with Revo Uninstaller. Than I again installed OfficeTab and didn't change any defolt settings. The same.

About Microsoft Framework 3. I think I don't have it. I'll try to install it.

Sergiy

OK. I installed the program and nothing works. When I open Word document, I see this message.
http://pic.ipicture.ru/uploads/090825/8QnE2y1px...
And there's no tabs. Every new document opens in new window, not tab. I use Word 2007 (Russian version).

Ben

It worked for alot of people. I can not reproduce the problem in VirtualBox. Have you got Microsoft Framework 3 installed? Did you change any of the default settings in OfficeTab?

Let me know. thanks.

amz

this is awesome stuff <33 xox

Ray

beautiful software

Jason

How do you do the split document view like in one of those screenshots?

Ben

Hi Jason

To split the documents up simply go to View on the Ribbon Tab, then click on either "Arrange All" or View "side by side" next to arrange all. You can then resize these individual windows freely.

DrJenCat

This is fabulous! Thanks dude. xxx

Kate

What a fantastic resource! Thanks for sharing your insights! For more useful tips and tricks like these, check out the Office Page on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Office

Cheers,
Kate
MSFT Office Outreach Team

K

Omg thanks Ben for the tip. much appreciated.

Ben

Oh No, I didn't know one of my plugin disable the commenting on this page, and I had to reactivate ping and comment. :(
.-= Ben´s last blog ..Add Tabs to Microsoft Office Applications =-.

evelyn

Actually the research stuff of OfficeTab have made great improvement on the application and fixed the bugs.Now its new version is a great and useful application for all of you to try. Anyone who is interested in it please go to its official website: www.officedocumenttab.com, download and try it.

Add Tabs to Microsoft Office Applications with OfficeTab

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