Fillable Form Text Box Order

[mrlavala]

Hello... I'm using OO 4 and creating a document with form boxes (text boxes) that my client can simply fill in and then save as a new file for their records. The problem is that after creating a three page document with 30 form fields the form does not tab correctly after it is saved. When I test the form (before password protecting the document with a sector) it works just fine. Once I save it and protect it and then reopen it, it does not tab through the text boxes correctly... it jumps around and sometimes does not even go to certain boxes.

Any direction would be great.

Robert

[MTP]

I'm not sure what would cause the tab order to change. To view / change the tab order, put the Writer file into design mode: on the toolbars "form controls" and "form design" it is the second icon from the left (or top); the icon looks like a triangle with a pencil and has the tooltip "Design Mode On/Off" when hovered over. If the toolbars are not visible, go to View -> Toolbars -> and select "form design".

Now open the Form Navigator: on the toolbar "form design" is the fifth icon from the left (or top) and looks like a rectangle with a compass in the upper right corner. The popup window should show a top-level "Forms" with an icon that looks like rectangle on top of a folder, then a "Form" just a rectangle and then all your text boxes under that. Right click the "Form" and select "Tab Order..." and a box will pop up where you can order them as needed.

If one isn't on the list, bring up its properties window. There are two ways to do this: 1) from the form navigator window, right-click the text box name and select "Properties" or 2)right-click the text box itself (in the Writer document) and select "Control". On the "General" tab of the popup window, change the "Tabstop" field to "Yes".

When you're done, leave design mode (by pressing the triangle with pencil icon again) to test everything out. Hopefully going through it in design mode like that will make the setting stick through a save.

[MTP]

Also, are you saving as a *.odt or as something else? If something else, the problem might be that OpenOffice is only mostly compatible with other software formats, and you might have found one of the limitations to its compatibility.

[mrlavala]

So I opened the suggested dialogue boxes and tried change the order. (Tabstop is already set to "Yes"). The result was that the order did not change. In one box it shows the mixed up order of the boxes and that is generally the way the tabstop relates to them, the second box on the right in after I pressed automatic ordering and said okay. Nothing happened and the document still doesn't tab correctly. Maybe I'm missing something easy?

[MTP]

The box on the right in the screenshot ("tab order") is the one that controls the selection order when tabbing through the document. Does its display match with the behavior of the fields (i.e. if the field named "4" is selected, tab will change selection to the field named "5", then the field named "6", etc.)?

If the tab order display is showing how the tabs behave, and that behavior order needs to be adjusted: highlight the name of an out of order text box in the "tab order" window. Press the "Move Up" or "Move Down" button to put it in the appropriate place. Repeat for other controls, until they are all in the correct order. ("Automatic sort" is supposed to order them by position in the document, which I think is what you want, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if that action is buggy.)

The number-names probably refer to the order the boxes were created and not necessarily the order they need to be in. If desired, they can be renamed to something more descriptive by going to the properties window for each box, general tab, "Name" field.

[mrlavala]

Okay... thanks to everyone for helping. I believe I found the issue. It has something to do with previously formatted document I was using to insert the form fields into. Once I scrapped it and recreated the form from scratch, it works perfectly.

Thanks again.
Robert

[mrlavala]

And upon further discovery (something I just discovered) is that when you want the document to have one section and you insert a header or footer it chops the section to a one page limit so the form ends on the page instead of flowing to the next.

This is easy to get around on the small document I'm working on but does anyone have a suggestion or is it possible to have the header/footer NOT disrupt the section?

Thanks.