How To Organize Gadgets By Adding Tabs in iGoogle

Google new version of their Personalized Homepage, now known as iGoogle, is loaded with many gadgets that you can add to your homepage from email, RSS feeds, weather updates, to almost everything. Adding gadgets is simple and creating iGoogle gadgets is even easier. But as you soon realize, your homepage has become a gadget mess needing some big time organization. This is where adding tabs can help move and manage your gadgets into a more organized homepage.

With the use of tabs, you can create additional pages (tabs) by name, so you can move existing gadgets off you homepage into the new tabs, making iGoogle into a mini web site.

To get started, logon to your Google account and access your iGoogle homepage. You will notice at the top upper left next to Home, is the Add a tab link.

Clicking on the link, displays the Add a tab dialog box. Here you can enter the name of the tab in the Tab name: field. I like to leave the check box checked next to "I'm feeling lucky. Automatically add stuff based on the tab name". By leaving this checked, iGoogle will search for some of the popular gadgets based on the word or phrase you entered in the Tab name field.

As you can see, the email gadgets that iGoogle found include Gmail (of course) Yahoo Mail and so on. You can delete the gadgets you do not want by clicking on the "X" in each gadget, and add any that it did not find by clicking the Add stuff link in the top right corner of the tab page.

If you already had the email gadgets picked out and on the homepage, they can easily be moved into the newly created email tab by left click and hold on the title bar of the gadget and dragging it on top of the tab you just created. In the screenshot below, the Gmail gadget is being moved to the email tab:

As you progress along and get organized, here are a couple of tips in case you make a mistake.

If you named a tag that you don't like or misspelled wrong, just double click on the tab to edit the name. You can also delete the tab at this time.

Edited: Google has recently changed how you can rename and delete a tab by adding a pull down arrow, Also added is the newly added ability to share tabs with the Share this tab also found in the drop down. When sharing a tab, a dialog box will display, and let you email the tab to anyone:

 If you delete a tab or gadget, and immediately realize it was a mistake, you have one chance to un-delete it by clicking on the Undo link found under the iGoogle search box.

As you continue to add tabs, you can keep track of which tab you are in since Google color codes the tab and all the gadget title bars making the iGoogle experience that much organized!