finding and deleting old or useless fields

having jumped right into developing my files, and now learning the importance (after the fact) of documentation, and keeping things clearly labeled, i figured out a fairly easy way to find those fields which were at one time created, but never found their way to a layout, or never had any data entered into them.

here's what i did:

create a new layout, and put on it any fields you think may be extraneous, along with a field label, which will tell you the name of the field. then doa find by the fields one at a time, entering "=" into them for the find request. if the number of records found=the number of records in the file, then you know that no record has any data in that field, so it can be safely deleted.

i found that the other fields--fields that had some data in them--either were obscure fields i had created and used only for a short time before finding abetter solution to fit my needs, or were used by calculations i had fogotten about.

just thought i'd share that with you.

josh