Every Meeting planner has a love hate relationship with Word and Excel. We use them all of the time but nothing bothers us more than having 15 office documents and 20 spreadsheets open at the same time. Really, it bugs the crap out of me…. I can only imagine how you feel.
It is not that most machines can’t handle it, I have a bomb-diggity computer that can handle all of that plus 27 tabs in Chrome, an HD video running, 2 image slideshows, Firefox is chugging away, and Photoshop is itching to roll in the task bar. It bothers me because I hate the way that Windows organizes all of the open files. You just can’t find anything when you are working and have 20 docs open. Let me tell you…. meeting planners can have more excel spreadsheets open than an accountant snorting meth at tax time….
Thankfully, there is a solution for all of those Word and Excel windows; it is a little Office add-on called Office-Tabs.
What is Office Tabs
The premise is really, really, simple. If you are running Office 2010 or older (there is a solution for 2013), you install this little add-on and it creates tabs within Word and Excel.
Check out these screen shots:
Here is a note from the publisher:
Bring Tabbed Editing, Browsing and Managing User Interface to Microsoft Office 2010, 2007 and 2003
Office Tabs is fully free for personal users. No time limitation, No features limitation.
Office Tabs is a powerful office addin to view, edit and manage documents, workbooks or presentations etc via a Tabbed View in Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and 2010. Microsoft Office has not supported tabbed view by itself yet. Office Tabs solves this issue. With Office Tabs, you can manage multiple documents within a single window easily and quickly.
It works with all editions of MS Office: Enterprise, Ultimate, Professional Plus, Professional, Standard, Home and Business (Small Business), Home and Student…
The software includes three components: Office Tabs for Word, Office Tabs for Excel and Office Tabs for PowerPoint. It is fully free for home use (personal non-commercial use).
Head to the Office Tabs site to download.
This version is licensed for personal use. If you are “in the enterprise” or are going to be having 5 of your meeting planners, 3 assistants, and those two weird interns using Office Tabs on their work computers, don’t be an ass, pay for a license.
It also works on PowerPoint but a word of warning…. You can never have more than one instance of PowerPoint open or the PowerPoint Fairy comes to smack you on the head with her magic wand, and after she does that, she kicks you in the shins and pokes you in the eye.