I have never found a way to specify the sequence and I am reasonably sure
that Word has always decided the sequence - I could be wrong of course but
wonder if you are remembering some other sequence, e.g. the sequence of
fields in a drop-down, perhaps in an earlier version of Word?

I suspect the only way to impose a sequence is to use field names that Word
fails to recognise (it will probably only try to recognise fields with the
sort of names you would find in an address database) - e.g. if you call your
fields 1name, 2street, 3city etc. you might force a sequence. You could do
that by assigning alias names in an Access query to avoid disturbing the
names in your underlying Access table(s).

Peter Jamieson