Excel add-in · Windows
Your workbook has 87 sheets. Excel gives you seven centimetres.
Vertical Tabs puts every sheet in a pane you can read, search and drive from the keyboard.
€19 incl. VAT, once after that — not a subscription.
Questions or problems? Email us and we will help.
support@excelverticaltabs.comLive demo — press Ctrl Shift S
The tab strip was designed for five sheets.
It is the one part of Excel that has not changed since 1997, and the one part that a 40-sheet model breaks immediately.
Names get truncated
A strip that shows eight tabs at a time turns Depreciation schedule 2026 into Depreciatio…. You end up recognising sheets by colour and position instead of by name.
Scrolling is the interface
Those two small arrows are the only way through. Right-clicking them opens a modal list — which closes the moment you pick something, so comparing two sheets means opening it twice.
Hidden sheets are invisible
Excel's own Unhide dialog does not list very hidden sheets at all. Open a workbook someone else built and you have no way of knowing what is in it.
A pane that behaves like part of Excel.
Docked left, 200 pixels wide, remembers itself between sessions. Everything below ships today — there is no waiting list and no "coming soon".
Search that ranks
Type a few letters and the list narrows as you go. Sheets that start with what you typed come first, so Enter lands on the one you meant.
Very hidden sheets
Shown greyed and in italics alongside everything else — including the ones Excel leaves out of its own Unhide dialog. Right-click to bring one back.
Your tab colours
Each row carries the sheet's real tab colour as a stripe down its left edge, so a workbook you colour-code stays readable in the pane.
Rename and reorder
Right-click any sheet to rename it in place, hide it, make it very hidden, or move it up and down the workbook — without going near the tab strip.
Never needs the mouse
Ctrl+Shift+S puts the caret in the search box from any cell. Type, walk the matches with the arrow keys, press Enter - and the keyboard is in the sheet, ready to type.
Stays in step
Rename a tab, recolour it or drag it somewhere else and the pane follows within about a second — including the changes Excel raises no events for.
Chart sheets too
Chart sheets are listed with everything else, not quietly skipped — which matters in the reporting workbooks that have a dozen of them.
Two workbooks, two panes
Open a second workbook side by side and it gets its own pane. Close one window and the other keeps working.
Sheet to sheet, without letting go of the keyboard.
Every sheet keeps its place, so going back is the same three keys. Try it in the demo above.
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Ctrl + Shift + S
From any cell
You are working in C5 on Summary. The shortcut puts the caret in the search box, and the sheet stays exactly as it was.
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c a s h
Type part of the name
The list narrows with every letter. Any word of the name matches.
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↓ ↑
Pick the one you mean
The arrow keys walk the matches. The caret stays in the search box, so you can still change what you typed.
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Enter
Straight into the sheet
The sheet opens with the keyboard in it. Arrows move the active cell and typing goes into it - no click needed.
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Ctrl + Shift + S · s u m · Enter
And back again
Summary opens on C5, where you left it. Start typing and you are overwriting that cell.
Esc clears the search; Esc again puts you back in the sheet without moving.
The same job, without buying the suite.
Worth knowing what else exists before you pay for anything.
| Vertical Tabs | XLNavigator | Kutools | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vertical sheet list | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Search and filter sheets | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Shows very hidden sheets | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Rename & reorder in the pane | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Keyboard shortcut to search | Ctrl+Shift+S | — | — |
| Installs without admin rights | Yes | — | — |
| Licence works offline | Yes | — | — |
| Does only this one job | Yes | No | 300+ tools |
| Price | €19 incl. VAT, once | ~€30 | ~€45 |
Competitor prices are approximate list prices converted to euro. Compared on the features this page is about, not on everything these products do — Kutools in particular is a large suite and may well be the better buy if you want the other 300 tools. Checked September 2026.
Nineteen euro. Once.
Try everything for seven days first. No account, no card, no email address.
The price shown is what you pay — EU VAT is included. Billing, invoices and VAT are handled by Paddle as the merchant of record.
- A licence key for you, on two of your own machines — a work one and a home one.
- Every feature. There is no higher tier to upsell you to.
- Validated on your own computer — nothing is sent anywhere, so it keeps working on a machine with no connection.
- Reinstall or upgrade without digging out your key again.
- Thirty days to change your mind. Email us and you get your money back, no reason needed — the refund policy says so in writing.
Two minutes, no IT ticket.
Everything goes under your own user profile. Nothing asks for an administrator password.
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Close Excel
The installer cannot replace files Excel currently has open. This is the only step people skip.
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Unzip it, then run VerticalTabsSetup.exe
About 4 MB. Right-click the download and choose Extract All — running it from inside the zip window will not work. The installer puts everything in
%LOCALAPPDATA%\VerticalTabsand registers itself for your user only — no UAC prompt at any point. -
Start Excel
The pane is already open and docked on the left, and there is a Vertical Tabs tab on the ribbon. Open your worst workbook and type something.
Before you download.
Does it work on Mac or Excel on the web?
No — Windows desktop Excel only, and that is a deliberate choice rather than a gap. Docking a pane on the left, hooking a global keyboard shortcut and reaching very hidden sheets are all things the modern web add-in platform cannot do. Building this properly meant giving up Mac and the browser.
Which versions of Excel?
Excel 2007 through Microsoft 365, in both 32-bit and 64-bit. You need .NET Framework 4.8, which Windows 10 version 1903 and everything newer already includes. There is no VSTO runtime to install and nothing else to download.
Does anything leave my computer?
No. The add-in makes no network connections at all. Your licence key is verified on your own machine against a public key built into the add-in, so there is nothing to phone home to — it works the same on a machine with outbound traffic blocked, and a problem on my end can never lock you out of a licence you paid for.
How many computers can I use one licence on?
Two — a work machine and a home machine is the usual pair. Nothing checks this, because the key is verified offline and there is no licence server to phone, so it comes down to trust rather than enforcement. Replacing a computer does not use up your second slot: uninstall from the old one and carry on. Buying for a team means one licence per person, and for ten or more I will invoice you once rather than make you buy them one at a time.
What happens when the trial ends?
The pane shows a message and a place to paste your licence key, and the sheet list stops. Nothing in your workbooks changes and nothing is removed — Excel carries on exactly as it did before you installed it. Enter a key and the pane comes straight back.
Windows warned me about the installer.
SmartScreen flags installers it has not seen often yet, which is every new independent release. Choose More info then Run anyway. If you would rather not, that is a reasonable position — wait, and check back once it has more downloads behind it.
Why is the download a zip rather than an installer?
Because a bare .exe does not reliably arrive. Browsers hand every downloaded program to your antivirus, and a newly released installer that no scanner has encountered yet can fail that check outright — the download is refused with a message about a failed virus scan, which is alarming and tells you nothing. A zip is not put through that check, so it downloads properly and you can see what you are getting. Each release is published with its SHA-256 in SHA256SUMS.txt if you would like to verify the file before running it.
How do I uninstall it?
Close Excel, then Settings → Apps → Vertical Tabs → Uninstall. That removes the add-in and its log. Your licence key and trial date are kept, so a reinstall or an upgrade picks your licence up without re-entering it. To remove those too, delete the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VerticalTabs and the folder %LOCALAPPDATA%\VerticalTabs.
Something is broken. Who do I talk to?
Me — support@excelverticaltabs.com. Vertical Tabs is written and supported by one person. There is a log at %LOCALAPPDATA%\VerticalTabs\logs\verticaltabs.log, and attaching it is usually enough for me to find the cause.