We think the answer is yes, and the fact that you have to ask tells you everything about how traditional spreadsheets treat the people who use them. You have built a thoughtful order form, locked cells, protected sheet, smart dropdowns that narrow as you type, and the one thing standing between your team and a smooth workflow is the arbitrary order in which the cursor moves. That is not a technical limitation; it is a design choice baked into tools that never considered how actual people work. The cursor follows the column-and-row grid because that was the easiest thing to program, not because it is the most useful thing for you.
The fix exists, but you should not have to hunt for it. In a spreadsheet that respects your process, you would set the tab order the same way you set the cell references: directly, visually, and without workarounds. You would click from D19 to C19 to B19 because that is the sequence your order entry follows, not because B happens to be before C in the alphabet. This is not a niche request. Anyone who has ever built a data entry form, a timesheet, or a customer intake sheet has felt this friction. The tool should adapt to the task, not the other way around.
What makes this worth discussing is not the technical detail, it is the assumption behind the question. You assumed the problem might be unsolvable. You described your ideal tab flow with the tentative tone of someone who has been told "no" too many times by software that claims to be flexible. That hesitation is the real cost. Every time a user wonders whether their tool can do something sensible, the tool has already failed. The answer should not require a forum post. It should be a checkbox in the properties panel, a drag-and-drop reordering of cells, or a simple sequence list that you can edit in seconds.
So here is our plain opinion: if your spreadsheet cannot let you decide where the cursor goes next, it is not ready for the work you are asking it to do. You have already done the hard part, mapping out the logical flow, building the validation, protecting the integrity of the data. The last step is to make the tool follow your lead. And if the tool cannot do that, find one that can. The cursor should move the way your process moves, not the way a grid was numbered in 1985.