I just read a article about adding "tabs" to Word that allows you to have multiple Word documents own in tabs, like you have for Firefox or IE. The lady was saying that she had 4 or 5 Word documents open at the same time and the "tab" option. She said she would be lost without web browsers having tabs, so it just makes sense to have such an option in Word.
So I was wondering if anyone knows any add-on to LibreOffice that would allow multiple Writer docs open at the same time in without having multiple instances of LO open at the same time. That would make life easier sometimes. Since OOo's extension site is not working half the time, I thought someone here might know of such an extension.
I think you are missing the point here! If you open, say, Internet Explorer, when it's already running, you get another instance. Tabs change that - don't they? - so that you can have multiple pages within one instance. But it's been a very long time since Word has behaved like that: if you start Word when it is already running, it merely opens another document in the same instance of the program. This is despite your seeing separate windows.
In fact, OpenOffice and LibreOffice are already ahead of that, since they are integrated suites, so you can even open multiple documents of different types in one instance of the program. You can have a text document and a spreadsheet both open in the same instance of the suite (which is why it's sometimes unhelpful to think of Writer and Calc as being separate programs). Try opening a spreadsheet from within Word or a text document from within Excel: no joy!
The way you move between multiple documents in applications is generally using the Window menu - and this works in OpenOffice and LibreOffice as in anything else. And with these suites, you even get all open documents, even if of different types. (With the ribbon, this appears under View | Window in recent versions of Word.)
What you could be asking for, then, is not the ability to have multiple documents open in a single instance - which is already here - but simply a move from a Window menu to tabs as a way of handling them.
Unless I misunderstand things ...
I do not deal with more than 1 to 3 different office type of documents at a time. But for the person who writes books, papers, and other things like that, could have the main document in one tab, the bibliography in a 2nd, a footnote section in a 3rd, notes and other research in still others. Then tabbing between documents might be easier than between "programs" shown on the task bar. I know of one author that went from StarOffice to OOo and from Windows to Linux since he used a different style of keyboard, instead of QWERTY, and Linux was easier to setup that keyboard that was easier for him to use. He also wrote his own macros to do functions he needed, or wanted, that would help him write his 3 to 5 paperback novels a year. His wife still use Windows since they could not get the Linux machine to work with the dial-up modem. I do not know if he will be moving over to LibreOffice, not that Oracle owns the rights to the name.
I think the tabbed document idea would work great for the type of work he described doing in his author's note at the end of most of his books, or his monthly blog. For me having tabbed web pages in Firefox works for my need to page back and forth between web "documents" to keep up with weather reports[2 pages], hourly/daily reports on what my computer is doing with BOINC, several LibreOffice related pages including several wiki pages, and whatever other web pages I need to keep an eye one and do not want to have to open up every time I want to see some info.
If I wanted to deal with writing, like I use to work on for thesis papers, I thing having a tabbed work environment would help keeping all the various documents together and arranged more neatly than the ways I had to deal with in the past. Also it would give me only one listing in the task bar realistate when I have to have many different programs open at the same time. I currently have a simple schedule, computer monitor, BOINC manager, LibreOffice, Thunderbird-main, this email in Thunderbird, and FireFox [with its own 7 tabs]. If I had to have 3 or more LibreOffice documents open, the task bar package names would get too small to mean anything to identify which LO task belongs to which document. I once has over 15 tasks open at the same time, and it was a pain. Tabbed document management withing LibreOffice would reduce that mess sometimes.
![[TEST] Document Foundation Community](https://communitytest.documentfoundation.org/images/discourse-logo-sketch.png){kind=logo}
