[Robert M. Franz (RMF)]

Hi Kristina

Kristina Demers wrote:
[..]
Ok - I am so interested to know - Why does everyone keep mentioning that it
would take up too much memory? My excel documents tend to be incredibly
large - especially when creating pivot tables - and setting up all kinds of
formulas... but yet MS still allows users to have tabs in Excel. Why is it
so different for a word document? That seems like lightyears simpler and
smaller...)

A Word document is much more complex!

I'm not an Excel guru, but the underlying structure of a sheet is a
two-dimensional array of cells. Can be very large, but rather easy to
manage (as long as you follow the expert's advice and don't merge cells
:-)). An Excel file has styles, too, but they are common to the whole file.

Now, Word, that's a different beast: a document is a collection of
sections, these are a collection of paragraphs, and all section
properties (headers, page size, etc.) may be different in every section.

What you are proposing is to have "many files in one," accessible
through tabs. So, what about the styles the do all tabs share the
same styleset? Numbering sequences? "QuickParts?" etc.

We've seen how complex this can be in a MasterDocument. Possibly that's
why many in here are less than thrilled by the thought.

Investing precious development resources into getting a tab feature in
Word, and getting it right the first time, is not something I would vote
for (not that this would or will mean much, mind you :-)). [Especially
since the workaround of opening up the couple of files together and
ALT-Tabbing between them does not seem to be such a burden.] There are
enough construction sites within the application IMHO.

2cents
Robert
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