Order of Tabbed Forms

[KACJR]

Greetings to the well of knowledge...



Because of certain design considerations and the amount of data I'm maintaining, I have chosen to use tabbed forms rather than floating windows or subforms. I show a sample below:

The hierarchy is supposed to be a person who is categorized as either a client, family member, donor, etc. as shown in the left most check boxes. Further, a client may use one or more services. In the example, our client uses Specialized Home Care. However, the tabs are intuitively out of order: the people tab is left-most, followed by the Specilaized Home Care tab, and lastly the Client tab. It should be People, People:Client, People:Client:Service. If a person uses a lot of our services, there will be separate People:Client:Service tabs and the People:Client tab will scroll off to the right. I'd like Access to order them properly but see no way to do it.

Keep in mind that when the forms are opened, it's people first followed by the high-level classification (i.e. Client), and the lastly the specific Client:Service tabs. I would expect Access to open and display them left to right, but, as you can see, it doesn't.

Anyone thoughts as to whether this is fixed behavior or if it is configurable?

Kind regards,
Ken Carter

[rpeare]

I haven't used Access2010 but in all versions of access I have used when you look at the tabbed control in design view you can change the order of the tabs by looking at the TAB INDEX property of each tab. So the tab you want to appear first would have a TAB INDEX of 0 (most database object start at item 0 rather than item 1), your second item would have TAB INDEX 1 and so on.

[KACJR]

Nope. No tab order properties for the form itself, which would make sense. This is not a tabbed control, though. It is the form itself, viewed as a tabbed document rather a window.

[rpeare]

I don't understand.

In your original post you were talking about the display order of the TABS themselves and wanting those in a certain order which is what I answered. NOT Tab ORDER, Tab INDEX, your form is made up of four tabs, in your design view if you click on the first tab (Click on the upper left corner where you see the label of the tab). When you view the properties once the tab is selected there will be a property called TAB INDEX.

I'm not talking about the individual controls on each form.

[KACJR]

OK, we do understand, but there's no such selection. See the screen shot below:

[rpeare]

Open the PROPERTIES window not right click menu. Left click the tab, then choose the properties box (looks like a hand pointing to a piece of paper, should be on the far right of that same ribbon toolbar you're showing in design view).

[KACJR]

I think there is still a misunderstanding. I am not using tabbed forms embedded within a form. I am displaying four separate and distinct forms as tabbed documents. I set this using File/Options/Current Documents then selecting "Tabbed Documents" instead of "Overlapping Windows".

When I do as you suggest, what I get are the Form's properties and there is no Tab Order property.

[rpeare]

ooooooh, I got you now. I don't know that there is a way to order them other than the order you open them. So for instance taking your original screen shot I would guess the PEOPLE screen was opened first then the PEOPLE SPECIALIZED CARE, and finally PEOPLE CLIENTS.

The order you display is strictly based on the order they are opened.

If you want to force a certain order (let's say each one of your forms has another form associated with it and you want to 'insert' it into your tab in the correct order, you'd likely have to check for every open form of a lower order, see if it's open, close them, open the form you want to open, then re-open all the forms you had open to start with.

If, however you always show these three screens when they open the database just change the order you open them and you should be good.

[KACJR]

Well, that's the point. I am opening the forms in the order they should be, but Access chooses to open them in the not-intuitive order and I don't see any way to force a specific order. I guess I'm stuck. But thanks for looking at this.

[rpeare]

I created a sample databse and made several froms with alphabetical listings and modified the order just by opening them in a different order. It may be that access 2010 doesn't follow that rule and does something with alphabetical form names or form captions. Play around with the captions first, see if it forces an alphabetical order through that first, if it doesn't make a few dummy forms with alphabetical names and open those up and see what the behavior is. If it sorts by NAME you can put whatever caption you want on the form and not alter the structure of what you have, if it sorts by caption you could alter your captions slightly and get the same effect.

[KACJR]

Hmmmm...an interesting thought that I did not consider!