Originally published at: New Tab Feature in Google Docs Improves Document Organization - TidBITS
For many of us, Google Docs is more than just a word processor—it’s a repository of individual and group knowledge. That comes courtesy of documents being searchable in Google Drive, easy document- and folder-level sharing, and excellent collaboration and revision tracking capabilities. Whether you want to take (and share) meeting notes, maintain internal handbooks, write and edit articles, or perform many other text-related tasks, Google Docs is highly effective.
So I was intrigued last October when a pop-up alerted me that Google had added document tabs to Google Docs. My initial question was how these tabs compared to the outline that Google Docs automatically creates from the document’s headings, as shown below in my FLRC board agenda.
It turns out that tabs add additional levels of hierarchy to document outlines. Over the past few months, both Tonya and I have found Google Docs tabs to be remarkably helpful.
Tabs Extend the Document Outline
Perhaps unsurprisingly, document tabs closely resemble sheets in Google Sheets and other spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel and Numbers. At their core, they serve as semi-independent sections that offer additional levels of hierarchy within the document outline.
A document with a clear hierarchy organizes content in a parent-child structure, making it easier to navigate and understand the relationships between different sections. This hierarchy has traditionally been achieved through heading styles. One of the huge benefits of using built-in heading styles in Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Pages, and other serious word processors is that you automatically end up with an outline of your document. The outline hierarchy flows from Heading 1 (the top level) down through Heading 2 to Heading 3 and beyond, with each level subordinate to the one above.
The document outline typically appears in a sidebar, enabling you to navigate within the document by clicking headings. Another common feature of the outline is the temporary collapsing of heading content to just the title; in some word processors (though not Google Docs), you can rearrange entire sections by dragging their headings. It makes me crazy when I receive a document that formats its headings with meaningless character formatting like bold instead of paragraph heading styles.
Although the document outline provides helpful navigation, a long document is still a single scrolling page of text, and any long document inevitably becomes unwieldy at some point. Believe me, since my last book, Take Control of Preview, was a single 178-page Nisus Writer Pro document that weighed in at 121 MB. Although I’ve never written a book in Google Docs, I regularly work with three documents that are 79, 95, and 144 pages in length. Or at least they were that long before I moved entire sections into separate tabs to convert them into far more manageable tabbed documents.
Tab Usage Details
For the most part, Google Docs with tabs work exactly as you’d expect. The tabs appear in a sidebar, and you can navigate to one by clicking it. Beyond the basics, the feature brings both delights and disappointments:
- Management: You can drag the tabs into any order you want, including multiple levels of nesting. However, just as in Google Docs before this, you cannot rearrange portions of a document by dragging outline headings. A vertical three-dot menu provides various other tab manipulation commands, and speech balloons appear next to tabs that contain comments.
- Find and replace: By default, find and replace works across all tabs in the document, but you can restrict it to the current tab. Choose Edit > Find and replace to bring up a dialog that provides an option to search All tabs or Current tab.
- Comments: As with search, you can interact with comments in a Google Doc in a single tab or across all tabs. Click the Comment button at the top of the document to open the Comment sidebar, where you can choose All Tabs or This Tab to determine which comments appear below.
- Outline navigation: Clicking a tab in the left sidebar switches to that tab. Once selected, clicking the tab again expands to show its outline headings. There is no way to view the outline for multiple tabs at once.
- Styles: Changes to paragraph styles do not propagate between tabs. If you have a document with four tabs, each containing multiple Heading 1 titles, changing the style of Heading 1 in one tab does not affect the instances of Heading 1 in the other tabs. Regardless of whether this is a bug or a design decision, it’s wrong. Within a document, it should be possible to change one Heading 1 (using the “Update Heading 1 to match” command) and have all Heading 1s reflect the change. Anything else is a recipe for frustrating inconsistency.
- Export and Print: If you choose any of the File > Download options within the document itself (DOCX, PDF, HTML, EPUB, etc.), you’ll get just the current tab’s contents. However, if you click the vertical three-dot menu and choose Download, you’ll get a DOCX file of the entire document. Google should extend at least the HTML and EPUB export options to include the entire document since the tabs correspond well to pages within a website or ebook. The same applies to printing. Within the document, choosing File > Print gets you just the current tab. However, in Google Drive, choosing Open With > Preview creates a PDF of all the tabs. (I’ve never needed to export or print tabbed documents, and I suspect most users will have similar experiences.)
- Sharing: While exporting and printing are tab-centric, sharing remains a document-level feature in Google Docs. Remember that anyone with whom you share a document can view all the tabs. There’s no way to restrict access to a specific set of tabs, and while that would be a valuable feature (Google Sheets provides sheet-level permissions), it might be too complicated to justify adding.
When to Use Tabs
Not every document in Google Docs stands to benefit from tabs. However, Tonya and I have found ourselves relying heavily on them in three specific types of documents:
- Long reference documents: As you see in my screenshots above, I compile information about the track and road races that I direct into a race handbook—setup instructions, timelines, announcements, notes for next year, and more. These documents started organically as informal notes years ago. Over time, I added headings and increasingly relied on the document outline for navigation. But as they grew, even the document outline became unwieldy, causing me to overlook important details. Dividing those documents into tabs has made them significantly more manageable.
- Meeting or project notes: Numerous note-taking systems exist, but in the real world, adopting one is challenging enough for a motivated individual, and it’s nearly impossible to impose one on a workgroup that needs shared access. Even technically adept people often balk at being asked to use a new system, and as Tonya said, if she asked her colleagues (whose digital fluency varies widely) to put everything in OneNote, Notion, Confluence, or similar collaborative platforms, there would be a revolt. In contrast, Google Docs is so widely used and has such a low barrier to entry that storing notes in a shared document with tabs works well. Geeks often underestimate the power of the lowest common denominator. Tonya also noted that her meeting note documents frequently include tabs for details the group needs to revisit during meetings.
- Reference materials for in-progress documents: Writers commonly need access to reference materials while working. For an individual, there are many solutions to this issue, but when collaborating on a document with multiple authors or editors, organizing those resources within the document better supports collaboration. Traditionally, we have pasted reference materials at the bottom of the document, but incorporating them into tabs is much neater and minimizes the risk of accidental publication.
While not every Google Doc needs tabs—and you’re never compelled to use them—they can provide valuable organization for longer documents and collaborative projects. Consider using tabs when document navigation becomes cumbersome, when you need a lowest common denominator system for a technically diverse workgroup, and when you want to keep reference materials linked to an in-progress document.