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Posted on December 3rd, 2009 by Stuart Turton
Tabbed documents: Office 2007 is now great
I wrote a blog post the other day whinging about the lack of tabbed documents in Office 2007. At which point, something remarkable happened. One of our readers (hello Greg, cheers) pointed me in the direction of a plugin that brings just such voodoo to Word, Excel and Powerpoint 2007. Then something even more remarkable happened. It worked, and it was bloody good to boot.
Unfortunately, this means I can’t be scathing and sarcastic – except about Microsoft which should include this feature by default, the big sillies - so I’m just going to point anybody who’s interested towards the plugin at OfficeTab.
Now the first thing you’ll notice about the site I’m ushering you towards is that it’s a little bit in Chinese. Don’t panic. Or do, if non latin script-based languages remind you of a particularly painful childhood episode. If you scroll down the page, you’ll find an English download link and the plugin itself is in English. I’ve been using it for a few days without any problems, but that doesn’t mean it won’t kill your cat or something equally unexpected, so consider this a “use at your own risk” warning.
One thing to note is that you’ll need Visual Basic for Applications installed which can be found under the Office Shared Features section of the Office 2007 installer. If that’s installed you’re good to go, if it’s not then Office 2007 will go all sorts of crazy and entirely fail to tell you why. Gotta love those Microsoft error messages.
Tags: Microsoft, Office 2007
Posted in: Random
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14 Responses to “ Tabbed documents: Office 2007 is now great ”
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December 3rd, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Slightly worrying typo in the screenshot – “Colse ActiveDocument”?!
December 3rd, 2009 at 3:54 pm
I’d wait until I knew it didn’t dial home with my all my work before installing.
December 3rd, 2009 at 9:33 pm
Office 2007 will never be great as long as it’s bedeviled with that awful “schmucks” interface, designed to pander to the lowest common denominator user.
December 3rd, 2009 at 11:37 pm
where can I download VBA for applications
December 4th, 2009 at 1:41 am
I don’t know David, personally I find the Ribbon to be a much cleaner, friendlier interface than it’s predecessor.
December 4th, 2009 at 11:17 am
You little beauty! – OfficeTab, that is. Works wonderfully, I’m no longer pining for ctrl+tab switching between office documents, Word stays open when all documents have been closed and my task bar is less crowded. It’s all good and the cat is still alive. Besides, I assume if a PC Pro blogger were to recommend software that was full of malware, despite the “use at you own risk” protestations, they would be handed their head, or at least their P45, on a plate!
December 4th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
If you use IE explorer with the Google toolbar you can translate the page into English – and it makes sense!
December 4th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
If a small business has the skills to design software to do this, why has Microsoft not already done it themselves?
It’s probably one of the most requested features in Microsoft’s entire product portfolio so it doesn’t make sense for them not to do so?
PS- can you use google toolbar to translate the recaptcha thing on this site because I could do with the help.
December 4th, 2009 at 8:24 pm
If this can be done to MS Office, what about:
1. Enabling importing of .pcx graphics into MS Office documents.
2. Enabling thumbnails of .pcx files in Windows Explorer.
3. Re-instating the animated texts utility that was in Office 2003.
4. brightonmb@gmail.com
December 9th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Don’t install this. I see the tabs, but when I click on on one closes all other open documents. Now I’ve uninstalled it, I still only see one Word icon on my XP task bar or if I alt+TAB. Now I can’t switch between Word docs at all and I need to reinstall office!!!
December 9th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
Found a fix for the problem mentioned above.
After uninstalling, go to Word Options > Advanced > Section: Display and tick ‘Show all windows in the taskbar’.
Now I can see all my documents again!
December 10th, 2009 at 11:38 am
MD5 Checksums do not match. Should be E9BF90ABA4C29CC452845110295FAD58 but I am getting 48e16d5990dab11ad163549385abfa3f. ??
May 31st, 2010 at 12:26 pm
Thanks for the link! Such a plugin will be really helpful, I didn`t even know there exists such a thing.
October 17th, 2011 at 9:50 am
Exciting news! Office Tab in English is available, I found it at extendoffice.com. This website seems be developed in china. Anyway, thanks to it, I have tabs in my office application and it works great.