Tab Order Faux Paus..Is It Too Late?

[DetectDave]

I created a survey in Liefcysle Designer ES 8.2. In my haste to get it distributed and returned by email, I neglected to pay attention to my tab orders as well as their lack of proper labels.  Now when I am getting my responses back and collecting them via Adobe Tracker, I am having serious issues when I export the data into Excel. None of the tabs are in any sense of order that I need in order to easily extract my data. We are also hand keying in some responses that were not returned electronically.  My question is this.... If I change the tab order on the original form that went out, will I get a totally different set of data back for people that fill it out electronically in the future or will it "merge" with the old responses and give me the nice ordered format that I should have set up in the first place.  I guess the same question would apply with the responses we enter by hand.  If we use the new form, will it "merge" with the old responses in a favorable way.  I can't believe I overlooked this and if I can't correct it, I am stuck with hand manipulating about 88 tabs sets from over 1000 responses. If anyone could offer some sage advice here, I would sure apreciate it.  Thank you in advance.

Sincerely,

Dave

[arpynrp]

how are you exporting to excel?  do you use the field names when exporting?  logic would tell me that if the field names are in fact being used to export, then it doesn't matter what order they are in originally, but what would matter is the order specified in the export.  does that make sense to you?  does anyone else have any thoughts?  am i way out in left field in this?

-rpeterson

[DetectDave]

Actually Renee, I screwed up in the first place. I failed to label my fields and set my tab order on the original form.  Thus when I use the export tool in Adobe tracker, it exports in a csv format that is pretty jumbled when opened in Excel. I can hand sort it and relabel then fields then but w/ 400 responses and over 60 tabbed fields, its pretty time consuming.  I'm just looking for some type of shortcut to help me sort through my own stupidity.  I've attached an example of the screwed up export (Smithton file) and an example of a response from my revised form.(Revised Tab) Thanks for your initial response.

Sincerely,

Dave