Office Tab 6

Introduction
About Office Tab
Using Office Tab
Pricing and Support
Conclusion

Introduction

If you find it difficult to access the Window menu in Office 2007 and 2010 applications, then you will want to look at Office Tab. I use PowerPoint 2007 and 2010 often and find it difficult to navigate between multiple, open presentations -- and Office Tab makes life a lot easier in that type of scenario. In addition, Office Tab also works with Office 2003 versions of PowerPoint, Excel, and Word.

About Office Tab

Office Tab 6 is from Detong Technology Ltd. a company based in Hainan, China, which provides various Microsoft Office add-ins. You can learn more about Office Tab and download a 30 days trial version from their site.

Office Tab 6 includes three Office add-ins:

1. Document Tab for Word
2. Workbook Tabs for Excel
3. Presentation Tabs for PowerPoint

The add-in brings the tabbed interface into your Microsoft Office applications. This review is done in PowerPoint 2007 -- but it works the same in Microsoft Excel 2007 and Microsoft Word 2007 (or even Office 2010 versions of PowerPoint, Excel, and Word).

My contact at Detong Technology Ltd. for this review was Lin Jie, thank you Lin.

Using Office Tab

Download the installer from the link given above, run the setup routine and follow the instructions.

1. Open PowerPoint, Excel, or Word. Figure 1 shows the tab within the PowerPoint interface (highlighted in red).
2. 
   Figure 1: PowerPoint interface with tab
2. You can also open multiple presentations to see more tabs (see Figure 2).
3. 
   Figure 2: Multiple presentations
3. To change the settings, click the Office Button in Office 2007 (or File menu in Office 2010), and choose (PowerPoint) Tab | Tabs for (PowerPoint) Options.
4. 
   Figure 3: Tabs for PowerPoint Options
4. This opens the Tabs for PowerPoint Options dialog box (see Figure 4). Within the General & Position tab, you can set basic settings for the tabs, and even customize some shortcuts.
5. 
   Figure 4: Tabs for PowerPoint Options dialog box
5. The next tab, Style & Color (see Figure 5) lets you choose tab styles and layouts. You can also set the tab font and colors too.
6. 
   Figure 5: Style & Color tab
6. The final tab, About Tabs for PowerPoint displays registration info. Click OK to close the dialog box and go back to your application.
Note: You might have to restart PowerPoint to see the changes you made.
7. To access individual tab menus, right click the tab. These show common file options such as Save, Save as, Rename, New, Open, etc. (see Figure 6).
8. 
   Figure 6: Tab menu

Pricing and Support

Office Tab costs US$25.00.

Support is through email. There is also an online FAQ and some tutorials.

Conclusion

Office Tab is a simple product that lets you handle multiple documents within a single window. The implementation is awesome with an all-in-one Settings center that allows you to configure the add-in. The tabs themselves work as expected with Close buttons and right-click menus. You can also double-click the tab to close the window. In all, it's a useful investment if you work with multiple documents.