Set form-field tabbing order in Acrobat

If a PDF document isn’t tagged and doesn’t have a specified tab order, the order in which the form fields were created determines their tabbing order. If a PDF document is tagged, the document structure determines the form fields’ tabbing order unless the user has deselected the Tab Order option in the Accessibility preferences.

You can change the tabbing order after you create the fields in either of two ways: by setting the tabbing order in the Page Properties, or manually.

Set tabbing order in Page Properties

  1. Click the Pages button  or choose View > Navigation Panels > Pages to open the Pages panel.
  2. Select one or more page icons, and choose Page Properties in the Pages panel Options menu.
  3. Select a Tab Order option:
    Option Description
    Use Row Order

    Tabs from the upper left field, moving first left to right and then down, one row at a time.
    Use Column Order

    Tabs from the upper left field, moving first from top to bottom and then across from left to right, one column at a time.
    Use Document Structure

    For forms with tagged fields, follows the order set up in the tagging.
    Unspecified

    Uses the existing sequence. For untagged forms, this is the order in which the fields were created.

Reset tabbing order automatically

  1. Choose Forms > Edit Fields > Set Tab Order.
    Note: You can choose this command only if the tab order property in the Page Properties is set to Unspecified.
  2. Click Yes in the message that appears to automatically determine the tab order.

Set tabbing order manually

  1. Choose Forms > Edit Fields > Set Tab Order.
    Note: You can choose this command only if the tab order property in the Page Properties is set to Unspecified. You can verify this by selecting the page in the Pages panel and choosing Page Properties on the Pages panel Options menu or context menu.
  2. Click No in the message that appears.

    Numbers representing the tabbing order for the fields appear in the upper left corner of each field.

    Note: If you decide not the change the tabbing order, click a blank area of the page or a part of the page that is not part of a field. This hides the tabbing order numbers so that clicking a field no longer changes the tabbing order.
  3. Click anywhere in the field that you want to be first in the tabbing order.

    The number in the upper left corner is set as 1.

  4. Click each of the other fields in the order that you want tabbing to occur.
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