Here’s How to Use the New Tabs Feature in Google Docs
Google frequently updates Google Docs with regular updates, but the new document tabs feature is a pretty significant improvement, especially if you work on a lot of longer documents and spend a lot of time collaborating with other people on projects.
Simply put, tabs are documents within documents. You can place three essays on Victorian poetry in separate tabs, but they will appear as one document in Google Docs. This isn’t something you’ll need for every document, but it gives you more options for documents with multiple separate sections—projects that previously required multiple documents can now only have one document with multiple tabs.
How Google Docs Tabs Work
The idea behind tabs is actually quite simple, but they’re not quite the same as tabs in a web browser: These Google Docs tabs allow you to separate different groups of pages within the same document. They’re somewhat similar to a table of contents or a series of bookmarks, but they’re not quite the same thing—they’re more like colored tabs that you can insert into a long book to help you quickly find different sections. If you’re using Excel or Google Sheets, they work similarly to using multiple sheets in one document.
With the existing table of contents and bookmarking features, you can jump to headings and specific items in one long, moving document. What tabs do is separate sections of your document more clearly—navigation is done through an expandable menu on the left side of the interface (the one that opens by default when you launch a new document). Click on the tab and you will see only that part of the document.
To make things even more challenging, there are also nested tabs, so tabs can contain tabs nested within them. On top of that, the outline feature that was already in place is still there: so any heading formatting you apply to your document also appears in your tabs. If you’ve never used outlines in Google Docs before, there are two new features to get your head around.
This has benefits for readers, writers, and editors alike—don’t forget that many Google Docs are designed to be shared. However, it’s not suitable for every type of document: tabs create separate stores within documents, so you won’t be able to read from start to finish as smoothly. If you’re writing the next great American novel, you might want to keep it in one tab and all your notes in another, for example.
How to Use Google Docs Tabs
When you’re in a document in Google Docs, creating a new tab is as easy as clicking the + (plus) symbol next to the document’s tabs title on the left. If you don’t want to use this feature for that particular document, click the arrow in the top left corner (this will turn it into a list icon, which you can click at any time to change the tabs back).
Create a new tab and you’ll feel like you’ve created a new document: you’ll be greeted with a blank page again. However, this is not a new document – it is a new tab within an existing document. If you click the three dots next to the tab title on the left, you will get the options “Delete” , “Duplicate” and “Rename “. You can also assign an emoji to each tab, making it a little easier to recognize what’s what.
The three-dot menu also allows you to move tabs up and down the hierarchy and add sub-tabs within the current one. You can also change the order by clicking and dragging the tab titles on the left, and create subtabs by dragging one tab on top of another. When it comes to tab layout, you have a lot of flexibility.
Apply any paragraph headings to your text (via Format > Paragraph Styles ) and those headings will appear under each tab as an outline – this was the case before tabs, but now you can have multiple structures across multiple tabs if you need them. . If you don’t see the outline under the tab, click the three dots next to it and select Show Outline .
Through the three-dot menu, you can also access the Copy Link feature, which you can share to direct someone to a specific tab rather than the document as a whole. Tabs are especially good for creating documents that many other people will read because they separate parts of the document, and for certain types of projects you may wonder how you ever lived without them.