Changing Tab Order
When you enter data on a form, you press Tab to move from field to field, in the order they're shown in the form. The progression from field to field is the tab order. When you first create a form, the tab order runs from top-to-bottom.
When you move and rearrange fields, the tab order doesn't change automatically. For instance, if you had 10 fields arranged in a column, and you rearranged them so that the 10th one was at the beginning, the tab order would still show that field in 10th position, even though it's now at the top of the form. This makes it more difficult to fill in the form, so you'll want to adjust the tab order to reflect the new stucture of the form.
Tab Order Improvements
You may want to change the tab order to be different from the obvious top-to-bottom structure, to make data entry easier. For instance, if 90 percent of the records you enter skip several fields, you may want to put those fields last in the tab order, so you can skip over them easily.
Follow these steps to adjust the tab order:
Select View, Tab Order. The Tab Order dialog box appears (see Figure 14.5).
The fields appear in their tab order. To change the order, click a field and then drag it up or down on the list.
To quickly set the tab order based on the fields' current positions in the form (top-to-bottom), click the Auto Order button.
In this lesson, you learned to improve a form by moving fields, adding text, adding formatting, and adjusting the tab order. In the next lesson, you will learn about some of the fancier controls you can add to a form.