Office Tab Free Edition

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on March 16, 2012

Office users who have been waiting for browser-style tabs need wait no longer, thanks to DeTong's Office Tab Free Edition. It adds Web browser-like tabs for displaying multiple open files in one window to Office 2003, 2007, and 2010. The tabs do more than display multiple documents, though. They also enable enhanced file browsing, management, and editing. It adds Workbook Tabs for Excel, Document Tabs for Word, and Presentation Tabs for PowerPoint. The fully functional add-ons are free to home users. The paid upgrade includes some advanced features that are unavailable in the freeware, though.

Office Tab's installer lets users choose whether to associate the add-on with all or any of Office's tools. While Office Tabs works inside each individual tool, the Office Tab Center serves as a control console for each add-on's settings, which include General & Position and Style & Color options. The Help button opens the program's Web page, which offers numerous resources, including tutorials. Making changes required us to reopen our Office apps. We started with Word. The most noticeable change was the addition of the tab bar, which displayed our open document and a button to open new tabs and can be positioned above or below the workspace. These tabs worked just like browser tabs, and we could click on any tab's label to access a full menu of choices. We clicked Office Tab on the toolbar to access the Favorites and Options on the ribbon, including a button to show and hide the tab bar. We could also open the Office Tab Center, add tabs to Favorites, and organize the Favorites list. In addition to shortcut keys, we could also reposition documents on the tab bar by dragging and dropping them. Office Tab also adds functionality, such as the ability to open new documents and close or save existing ones with various mouse clicks.

Office Tab adds very similar functionality to Excel and PowerPoint, with app-specific options. The browser-like features Office Tab Free Edition adds to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are so useful that we recommend this free add-on to all Office users.

Publisher's Description

From Detong Technology:

Free Office Tabs - Tabbed Browsing, Editing and Managing for Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and 2010. It works with all editions of Office: Enterprise, Ultimate, Professional Plus, Professional, Standard, Home and Business, Home and Student. Unlike web browsers -- Internet Explorer 8, Firefox or Chrome, Microsoft Office does not use a single window to hold multiple files for viewing and editing. The product lines of Office Tab improve the ability of MS Office, and bring the tabbed user interface to Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 (include Word, Excel and PowerPoint). Save all documents in one click! Easy determine which file has been changed, which has been saved: Office Tab will mark these modified documents or workbooks with an asterisk (*) in their names to indicate the modified documents or workbooks (except in PowerPoint).