Adobe ACROBAT 9 HOW-TOS - Page 256

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Organizational aspects. In Form Edit mode, the elds added to your
form are shown in the Fields pane sorted by their tab order. In forms con-
taining dozens or hundreds of elds, it’s often easier to locate a group of
elds you want to change by ordering them alphabetically. To do so, click
Sort in the Fields pane and choose Alphabetic Order.
Many complex forms, such as human resources, nancial, or engineer-
ing forms, contain numbered elds, which are also ordered sequentially
when you use the Alphabetic Order option. Read about examples of
numbered elds in #116, “Building a Batch of Buttons,” and in the sidebar
“Duplicating Buttons,” also in #116.
Functional aspects. It’s common knowledge that you can press the
Tab key to move through a form from eld to eld. This sequence, called
tab order, can be modied in the Fields pane if you have selected the Tab
Sort option.
There are several ways to adjust tab order:
•
The Default Tab Order option is chosen by default, and is assigned to
your form when Acrobat denes the form elds.
•
Order Tabs By Row is commonly used for forms that collect hundreds
of pieces of data. Tabbing in rows allows the user to tab across from left
to right.
•
Order Tabs By Column is commonly used when you are assembling
data for comparison. For example, a form lists sale quantities of dier-
ent items (values added in rows) according to a particular salesperson
(dened by column).
•
Choose Order Tabs Manually if you want to redene the order yourself.
Drag a eld’s label in the Fields pane up or down to change its order.
You may need to order elds manually when you are dealing with cal-
culated elds.
#90: Organizing and Ordering a Form
Making Form Fields
More Visible
It can be difficult to visual-
ize form fields on a stylized
form if they aren’t colored
or identified in some way.
Fortunately, Acrobat offers
preferences to set form field
visibility.
In a distributed form, your
users can toggle the Show
Highlight check box on the
Document Message Bar to
show or hide the highlight
colors, or show a border
when the mouse passes over
a field, with or without high-
lighting the form fields:
1.
Choose Edit > Prefer
-
ences > Forms (Acrobat >
Preferences > Forms).
2.
Click the “Show border
hover color for fields” if
you want to show a bor-
der around a field as you
pass the mouse over its
location on the page.
3.
Click the “Fields high
-
light color” color swatch
to choose a custom
color when you have the
“Highlight fields” option
selected on the form’s
Document Message Bar.
4.
Click OK to close the Pref
-
erences dialog.
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From the Library of Daniel Dadian