Taken from PCWorld Magazine, February 2012 Edition

If you’ve lamented the lack of tabs in Microsoft Office, lament no more.  Now you can enjoy the one feature Microsoft seems determined to keep out. Tabs let you keep multiple documents, pages, or the like readily accessible within the same window. But Microsoft hasn’t done much with tabs.  Sure, Internet Explorer got the feature in version 7, by what about Word or Excel?

The smart and effective OutlookTabs (outlooktabs.com) plug-in lets you open Outlook folders in tabs – and not just email folders, but also calendars.  Once installed, it adds a New Tab option below the Ribbon, as well as to context menus. You can reorder tabs by dragging and dropping them, and use keyboard shortcuts to cycle through them. It requires Windows XP or later, and supports Outlook 2007 and 2010.  It costs $25 for one license, but a free trial is available.

Want some tab love for Word, Excel and PowerPoint too? Office Tabs (office-tabs.com) is free, and it’s awesome. With Office Tabs you can manage multiple documents in the same window, just as nature intended. In fact, this surprisingly versatile add-on gives you plenty of control over managing tabs, determining their colour and font style, and so on. You can apply different settings across the three programs, and even disable Office Tabs for one or two of them. Other than that, your newly “tabbed” Office works just as the Office you know and love.  It works with Office 2003, 2007 and 2010, and supports the 32- and 64-bit versions of each. If you’re an Office user, I can’t recommend it highly enough. (Are you listening Microsoft?)