Acrobat XI form editing - cannot drag a form field to edit tab order

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
May 10, 2018
3 replies
5740 views

I am working in Acrobat XI. I'm up to about 70 fields and have plenty to go.

Suddenly I cannot drag a field to change its order in the field pane. I click, hold and drag, and can see the little dotted line move, but when I unclick the field remains stuck. All of the fields appear to be locked against dragging.

I could find nothing in the discussions on this problem and would appreciate any help. Thank you.

EDIT: I should add - I do have "sort manually" checked under the Tab Order dropdown.

C

chandlerp56509664

New Participant

I just had the same issue, I unistalled Acrobat and reinstalled and it worked perfect.

Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com

Brainiac

But even when the field is locked in Properties, it can still be dragged/dropped into the tab order.

I haven't run into the problem before and I do a lot of forms, but it's also been a few years since I used Acrobat XI and many features have been changed or improved

It appears you've taken the right steps, such as selecting the option to sort the fields manually. Does this happen to all the fields in the list? Or just one or some fields?

Do you have the ability to upgrade to Acrobat DC:2018, the latest version? It provides a few more options in controlling fields. You could download the free trial to see if it resolves the problem and then purchase it if it does.

Of course, work on a copy of your original file before moving it into a newer version of Acrobat.

|    Bevi Chagnon   |  Designer, Trainer, & Technologist for Accessible Documents ||    PubCom |    Classes & Books for Accessible InDesign, PDFs & MS Office |

P

patriciab86974420Author

New Participant

Thank you Bevi - I will ask our IT manager if we are on the latest version.

I think I may have solved the problem. While in form editing, I tried selecting Order Tabs Unspecified from the Tab Order dropdown. All the fields kind of hiccupped --- and suddenly I had the freedom to drag fields at will again. Oddly enough when I looked back under the Tab Order later on, it had reset itself to Order Tabs Manually.

I won't mark this solved yet just in case something else happens on this topic. Thanks again!

D

dblade

New Participant

I had the same problem and I used your solution (selecting Orders Tabs Unspecified) and it worked for me. It appears to be a glitch but it's a glitch that works.