Tabbles Free

Tabbles Free offers a new way to organise files on your hard drive

PC Advisor (UK)

  • Review
  • Specs
  • Images
  • User Reviews
  • Buy Online

Tabbles Free is software that offers something useful and different - a new way to organise and find files on your hard disk, not a File Explorer replacement.

Pros

  • Free, easy to use

Cons

  • Limited in the number of files it can use.

Bottom Line

Using Tabbles Free is a fairly quick-and-painless process. If you regularly work on projects which span multiple files which don't all logically fit into a single folder or hierarchy, Tabbles can be of great value.

Would you buy this?

  • Price

    Free (AUD)

One all-too-common phenomenon on the internet is the promising but not-quite-there-yet program which dies the lingering death of ever-slower updates until you visit their site and see a "Coming soon!" post from three years ago. Thus, it's a rare and wonderful thing when a program instead regularly updates, fixing flaws without shedding functionality. This is the case with Tabbles Free, as it has fixed a number of problems from its debut version while enhancing core functionality.

Here's how Tabbles Free works. A "tabble" is a "tag bubble", which holds all the files or folders tagged with a combination of attributes. This document, for example, can be tagged as a "Review," "Professonal Writing," "In-Progress," and "Tabbles." If we want to find every file associated with this review, including screen-shots, web links, and the like, we might grab everything tagged with "Tabbles." If we want to find all our incomplete works, we will open the "In-Progress" tabble. If we just want to see reviews we're still working on, we can easily combine the "In-Progress" tabble and the "Review" tabble, seeing just those files with both those tags.

Tabbles Free has changed a good bit from its earlier incarnations. First, the interface is much closer to Windows norms, and it's quite a bit more responsive as well, with more options for user configuration. (Such as being able to set the speed of the pop-up alerts.) Second, more features have been added, including the ability to have true nested tabbles, for tags which strongly relate to other tags.

For example, on a complex project, we created an "Outdated" tabble which appears inside that project's tabble, and which holds all the files (scattered over many directories) which are not current. This can also be done by creating a "root level" tabble called "Outdated" and then filtering all files with that tag from the main view, but nested tabbles lets me organize my information more easily, especially as the list of tags grows. It should be noted you can still tag any file with any tabble. If you have a tabble "Projects" and a nested tabble "Outdated," you can tag a file "Outdated" without tagging it "Projects," and it will show up when you open the "Projects" tabble, since all "Outdated" files are automatically included.

Tabbles Free can tag only 1,000 files, effectively making it a demo for the paid versions.

Keep up with the latest tech news, reviews and previews by subscribing to the PC World newsletter.

Be the first to comment.

Post new comment

Users posting comments agree to the PC World comments policy.

Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.

Most Popular

What's the difference between an Intel Core i3, i5 and i7?
Five reasons to avoid the Samsung Galaxy S4
Laser vs. inkjet printers: which is better?
Samsung’s 2013 Smart TVs: everything you need to know
How do I connect my TV to the Internet?

Best Deals on PCWorld

Software and ServicesView all »
SecurityView all »
Servers & StorageView all »
Desktop PCsView all »
NotebooksView all »