Choices not working same as in Pan6

I was wondering why some of my entered data was incorrect and I discovered that when you have a list of choices for a field Pan X chooses the first one alphabetically when typing a letter. For example if I have two choices named “Show services” and “Share” and the Show Services choice is higher on the list than “Share” Pan X only chooses “Share” I assume because it’s looking alphabetically. Pan 6 would choose the first instance from the top which is more logical since we usually arrange them by importance.

Also, typing two letters does not work, Pan X only looks at the first letter, if you type a second it searches the list for a choice beginning with that. For instance type “Sh” hoping to select “Show” but that doesn’t work.

If there is a way to fix this in a setting I can’t find it. I hope this will be corrected in the next update because it’s a royal pain not being able to simply type some letters and get a choice like it did in Pan 6.
Screen Shot 2020-03-02 at 11.33.34 AM

You seem to be contradicting yourself. Typing sh got you a word that began with sh, not one that began with h. Salary comes alphabetically before Share, so it isn’t ignoring the second letter.

This is probably the standard Apple way of working with lists. In the Finder, I put a list in order by date, and then typed the first three letters of a file name. There were two files starting with those letters, and it selected the one that was alphabetically first, rather than the one that was listed first.

I have to agree with Leo on this one and the Help documentations also indicates this is the way it works. Each letter typed while the choices box is opened will go to the item that starts with that letter. For example, if I type “s” it will go to the item “Something” and if I immediately type a “t” it will jump to “That thing” in the list. This is true whether it is set as a Choices field or a Text field as long as the mode is set to Automatic. Even if it is set to Choices and there is not a list of choices in the Choices tab panel.

This is from the Help file under Choices:

In addition to picking from the list of radio buttons, you can also pick an item from the choice palette by typing in the first letter of the item. If there is more than one item with the same first letter, however, you can only select by clicking.

Not only that, the choice does not necessarily go to the first item with that letter.

No Dave, looking at the image showing the list. If I want to select “registrations” for example and I type “R” Pan X selects “Raffle.” Pan 6 would have selected the first inbstance from the top which would have been “Registrations.” Previously on Pan 6 if I typed “Re” it would select “Registration” however in Pan X it first selects “raffle” then selects “Entertainment” after typing the “e.”

Nor does the choice necessarily go to the first item alphabetically. At least not unless it is alphabetizing all capital letters before all lower case ones.

Given the following, in order, list of choices: Basosquamous Bowen’s BCC KA Melanoma SCC ………… typing “B” or “b” always gives me “BCC.” Subsequent letters typed don’t matter, unlike the Finder’s preferable behavior. One factor that may play a role (I haven’t tested it) is that I have clairvoyance turned on for the field.

BTW, the “…………” choice was to enable entering unusual values beyond the listed choices using some work around code posted in forum a while ago.