>>There is, AFAIK, no way to programmatically change a field's order in the field list. You have to use the designer.

< snip >

>That's put the fields in alphabetical order. Or are you talking about something else?

There are lots of workarounds, but they all involve creating a new table. Try your technique with a contained table with long field names and/or extended table properties, and you'll see why we really need a native command. Something like:

ALTER TABLE MyTable MOVE COLUMN MyColumn 1

to move a column to the first column in the table. AFAIK, everything else that the table designer does, you can do in code, but not this.