In some of the older instances, tabbed forms is not an option for a user to select. They must go create a user preference for tabbed forms.

Instead of creating single-user preferences for tabbed forms the user has an option to create a system-wide user preference for tabbed forms.

Go to user preference and create a new preference with the following info:

name: tabbed.forms 
value: true 
system: true 
type: true| false