Draw a pair of text areas side-by-side (e.g., a two-page spread). Link them and fill with placeholder text. Open the Tabs panel.

The Tabs panel wants to be the width of both columns if you click the "Position Panel above Text" magnet icon. This probably means that much of it is shooting off-screen in one direction or another, as I would typically zoom in to work with a single column of text at a time.

Go somewhere in the second area and type a line like:
"foo bar stuff"
with tabs between the words. My desire is to have the three words left, center, and right aligned with respect to their column. This is tricky given the way the Tabs panel wants to align to the text.

The panel should align and be sized to reflect the current text block (i.e., the text block containing the cursor), not all of the linked blocks.