Tab order appears to be very broken. We don't use it.
Ordering your widgets in the hierarchy tab seems to be more reliable, though not perfect.
Note that once you've started using tab ordering, you can't "go back". You either need to manually remove the tags from the XML view, or start with a new file.
I too am experiencing tabbing difficulties (it skips over my table). Like most, I set my tabs using the View > Tab Order feature in LifeCycle Designer 8.0. Upon your advice, I fixed my tab order in the hierarchy tab view, but I still need to manually remove the tags from the XML view. What HTML tag am I looking for that determines the tabbing order?
Ok, I fixed my problem by going to view tab order and clicking on all of the fields. Even though the order was right before, I did notice that some things like non-interactive text display fields had a tab number. I skipped over these and now it works.
We've made significant improvements to Tab Order authoring in the upcoming LiveCycle ES Update 1 release. With that version (8.2) of Designer, there should no longer be inconsistencies in Tab Order between design-time and runtime (Preview or running in Acrobat or Reader).
