Organizing Tab Order of Form Fields

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
December 29, 2019
2 replies
2746 views

As per this post, I am trying to do the same, but have over 300 fields per page, and Acrobat does not organize them in any logical order. I've used the create multiple copies function a few times, and it has decided to randomly organize them as per the attached pic. I REALLY don't want to have to manually go through the list as it will only take one field at a time. Is there a way to pull a section together easily and then grab it as a whole and move it into the order of the overall sheet?

jane-e

Community Expert

“Acrobat does not organize them in any logical order.”

Hi

JR_Boulay’s reply will help you to fix what you have.

In addition, what I have seen in my experience with forms is that there is a logical order.

The first field created is #1, the second is #2, etc. Moving a field to a new position does not change its hierarchy, so that’s where setting Tab Order is essential. If you want to experiment with this, try having “Show Tab Numbers” on the next time you create a form and you’ll see how it works.

What I see in your image is that the five fields in the first row were created early, then each was copied eleven times (that we can see). Most likely, each was copied once, then the original and its copy were multiple-copied together. You can see that the first Skill Name is #4 and the others are #169–179, for instance, and the pattern repeats for the other fields.

So there’s the logic, but use Tab Order to fix it! 😊

~ Jane