OpenOffice needs tabs!

[bash]

Title says it all. With IBM releasing a beta of Lotus Symphony theres finally (correct me if Im wrong) an office suite with tabs. No I don't think its awesome if you have 4 or 5 documents open and they cluster up your desktop. At least we as Linux users have the advantage of having multiple workspaces.

But seriously, why not just include tabs. Problem with Symphony is the same as with all recent Lotus programms from IBM. For some reason they think its great to run their programm, coded in Java (luckily not known for being), in an eclipse plugin. This isn't just me being sarcastic, the official system requirements state that you need "512MB RAM memory minimum". I don't think thats anywhere near what a normal programm should use.

Anyways back to the original point. I think tabs in OOo would be great. And with the upcoming OOo 3 (1st or 2nd Quarter of '08) it thing its a good moment for the OOo devs to include something like this. I think it would increase useability and represent a nice feature to distingiush OOo from the other Office suites.

[Blue Sky]

This seems like a good idea for the front-end.

In my opinion what OpenOffice needs most is some serious refactoring of the backend. It's still painfully slow, and should have a more modular design so programmers outside of Sun Microsystems and IBM can contribute without having to study the code for weeks first. Also they should get rid of the Java dependency.It's good to hear that 25 programmers from IBM will be working on it full time now - that's exactly what it needs.

[nb123]

There is an ongoing project I believe, you can download a tabbed browsing add-on here: ---

http://sourceforge.net/projects/oootabbrowse/

I've downloaded it before, but it's still really buggy and is still in early development. You can check it out though. I think I read that they're having a problem implementing it as an add-on because they need to modify the program substantially.. so maybe they'll include this in future openoffice releases? Can anyone verify what I read on this?

But I agree with you, I really wish that there was tabbed browsing for openoffice! Unfortunately I'm just an amature programmer so I don't really know what the exact problems are in implementing it, so I can't really describe them in detail.

[SunnyRabbiera]

I heard staroffice uses tabs, but I have yet to confirm it

[Dimitriid]

Sure why not, you dont have to use em if you dont like em. I say when in doubt, add tabs. It can only help.

[ddrichardson]

Blue Sky +1

OpenOffice is in serious danger of heading off into bloatware territory I noticed the latest release has a bunch of features that most of us will never use and yet no real moves to improve core speed.

[Crashmaxx]

I was thinking this just the other day. I was opening a few things and wondered why there are no tabs. It would be best if the tabs could be different types too, like a writer tab, a calc tab, etc. And even better to be able to have them like split screen easily to drag and drop stuff from one type to another. I do a lot of scientific type work so I often have to embed spreadsheets in documents and so on.

[TeraDyne]

Blue Sky, I agree that they need to try and improve the speed. However, if I had to choose between tabs and more speed, I'd have to choose tabs.

[evilmrt]

Lotus Symphony gives you that, doesn't it? Thats just IBM's re-rolled OpenOffice....

[n3tfury]

great idea, ubun-two