The PC Doctor and Joe Wikert have both posted enthusiastic reviews about an Office add-in called Intellitabs. It’s a one-trick-pony, but that trick sounds like a good one: it adds tabs to the interface of Excel, Word, or PowerPoint so you can work with multiple worksheets, documents, or presentations from a single window.
Both reviews specifically pointed out the utility’s pricing was completely out of line. As of last week, the company wanted $79 for any one of the three add-ins, with a bundle price of $229 to get all three.
That price was completely insane, and to the company’s credit they announced new lower prices this week. The new price is $29 for each copy of the Standard edition, $59 for a Professional edition, or $99 for all three Professional products.
Sorry, that’s still too high for a simple Office add-in. It’s been many years since I took Economics 101, but I remember the concept of price elasticity of demand pretty well, and my instinct tells me that this add-in (if it does what it promises and doesn’t introduce instabilities) would be a huge hit at $29 for one program that adds this capability to the whole Office suite. I wouldn’t pay $59 unless it did a whole lot more.
Would you pay for this capability? How much?
Ed Bott 
Still too much – JMO. I mostly need this capability for Word and find WordToys (both a free and $20 Pro version offer tabs) meets my needs just fine.
A review of WordToys can be found at the Office Letter site: http://www.officeletter.com/blink/wordtoys.html
This utility adds tabs, so I don’t have to use Ctrl+F6? I’d probably try it if it were freeware, but it’s not worth spending money on.
That initial price was way too high. Having been a FrontPage and Word add-in developer for 8 years, selling Office add-ins is a tough gig. For starters, unlike Photoshop users, most Office users (outside of probably Excel) don’t even know what an add-in is. And if they did, they rarely want to plunk down money for one, no matter what it does. It’s a perception problem (I bought the program, why do I have to pay for even more software to make it do what I want?). When I priced my software, I would follow this rule: It should never cost more then 1/4 of what the host costs.
Dennis
$0
I’m with Jon above. If it were freeware, I might give it a try. I still seriously doubt it would make it into my set of standard-install software on every new machine, even if it were free though. Let’s face it, it’s just not annoying enough to make me spend the extra effort…
I can’t imagine why CTRL+F6 is so hard that I need to pay for this. Heck, I can even code AutoHotkey to do this for me if I really wanted. So in this case, no, I would not pay for it. For a powerful, time-saving add-in, I’d pay up to $30, but that’s the limit.
WordToys does something similar for free. ie you can save groups of documents into workspaces so you can open all the dox you need for say a meeting. It also has the open dox in a line along the bottom so I can swop between dox easily with one click. And since word count is on my toolbar anyway, this addin doesn’t do anything I really need that the free version of WordToys does. I actually paid $20 for the professinal Wordtoys as it does lots more beside the workspaces and tabs etc.