Hi Cary,
You don't need to number your tabs in order to select them - you can pass the tab number to the select method and it will get selected:
tabStrip.select(1);
You can also pass a jQuery selector that would match your TabStrip item (a LI element) by text:
tabStrip.select("li:contains(tab 2)");
There were also other issues with your jsFiddle - you were using the very first version of Kendo UI in it, one that is almost 2 years old now - and to get the TabStrip javascript object, you need to get its data, not the init result.
I've updated it to fix these and to use the second method.
Regards,
Kamen Bundev
the Telerik team
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