Ms Office Tune Up

When you have a form open in Form view, you can navigate from one field to another using the keyboard: Press the Tab key to move forward through the fields, and press Shift+Tab to move backward through the fields. Because you use the Tab key to navigate the fields, the order in which the controls are selected is called the tab order. The default tab order is the order in which you added the controls to the form. Unfortunately, this ini­tial order doesn’t always correspond to the “natural” order of the controls. For example, when entering an address, it’s natural to enter the street address, then the city, state or region, country, and ZIP or postal code, in that order. However, if you didn’t add the fields in that order, pressing Tab causes the user to navigate the fields unnaturally. Similarly, rear­ranging the form fields after adding them can cause the focus to jump haphazardly around the form.

To fix these and similar Tab navigation problems, you can customize the tab order to suit the form design. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Choose Arrange, Tab Order. Access displays the Tab Order dialog box, shown in Figure 1.


Figure 1 Use the Tab Order dialog box to customize the order in which the user navigates the form when pressing the Tab key.

TIP

If you’re customizing the tab order because you’ve rearranged the form fields, you can probably save yourself a bit of work by clicking the Auto Order button.This tells Access to set the tab order by working left-to-right and down through the form fields.This should give you a tab order that’s pretty close to what you want, so you may only need to make a few small adjustments to get the order just right.

2. Use the Section list to click the form section with which you want to work.
3. In the Custom Order list, select the control you want to work with by clicking the selection button to the left of the control.
4. Click and drag the control’s selection button to move the control up or down in the Custom Order list.
5. Repeat Steps 2-4 for other sections and controls you want to move.
6. Click OK.

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