OfficeTab Follow-up

by Ben on 25/08/2009 · Comments

in Microsoft Office

A day after I wrote about OfficeTab in my previous post. The post gained more coverage when it got featured on DownloadSquad and the traffic just kept coming.

One commenter on DownloadSquad wrote that:

I can’t say I’m disappointed, though. I was intrigued, but it probably would have been counterproductive for me because I probably wouldn’t have been able to have separate documents open on each screen of my extended (dual-monitor) desktop.

It appears that you can compare documents side-by-side on a single monitor, but I need more of the documents to be viewable than a single monitor would allow.

Well there is a workaround for the problem of OfficeTab not allowing Office Apps from creating new windows/instances. Its overcome by forcing Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint to create a new process.

To open Microsoft Office App’s separately in a new process. Simply in the run command box either from the Start Menu or press Win+ R and type:

For MS words: “WINWORD.exe -p”
For Excel: “EXCEL.exe -p”
For PowerPoint: “POWERPNT.exe -p”

There you go, new instances of Word, Excel or Powerpoint for your dual monitor setup.

Another commenter “Sam” commented on SlashNow that:

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, himself came up with the solution soon after:

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

Related posts:

  1. Add Tabs to Microsoft Office Applications with OfficeTab
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  3. Opera 10 Officially Released

  • marc
    work in Excel but does not work in word 2007...creates run time erroe ''13'' Type mismatch,
    have to disable the word option to make it work still with Excel...
    is there a way to help me?
  • OYB
    i cannot get it to work on my pc


    i keep getting an runtime error 339 when i try to run excel - word just crashes

    says oftab.ocx or one of its dependencies not correctlty registered : a file is missing or invalid

    oftab is in my system32 folder, i have registered and reregistered it. i still cant get the tabs to work. it worked on another system

    i'm using windows 7 and office 2010

    unfortunately the authors blog is in chinese, so i couldn't post this issue there. any ideas?
    thanks

    according to dependncy walker, it requires ieshims.dll

    looking for that now - dont now if it will resolve the problem. . .
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