I

You do not really mean copy and paste do you?? It's should definately be Set Field[ and it certainly pay off to Freeze layout while looping.

Another thing I see you doing is exploiting a global field for temporary storage of previous value, this means that you set two values in each step ...it is so that reading is faster than writing, because evaluation is triggered each time you leave a record having new value assigned.

Today can it be done with two scripts each having thier own loop to perform, but the trick is that the first script transferes a scriptparameter which is used in the second script to the comparison, the second scripts loop ends and returns to the first when all records being dupe are marked.

This is a pretty fast tecnique, but I can't think of anything faster than exporting summaries to another empty table, for then to return the sifted values.

--sd

You may be encountering the slowdown when you start to exceed the default file cache size, which is 8 megs. If so, increasing the cache size to a larger amount may improve performance.

A larger cache means trading some reliability for performance, but if you don't experience frequent crashes and you have good backups in place, it's probably worthwhile.

If this is a process you perform regularly, you might want to consider using a self-join relationship to identify duplicate records, and flag them as original or duplicate. That would allow you to find all duplicate records with a single find. It would also allow you to identify duplicate values during data entry.

Go to the FileMaker Help screen and do a search for the text

"Identifying duplicate values using a self-join relationship"

It provides a fairly good explanation of the process. If you already have some sort of auto-increment ID number in your table, you can use that instead of creating a new one as the help file suggests.

S

WOW...............what all of you suggested has worked flawlessly!! and the "freezing the window" has Sooooooo speeded up all my looped scripts. I really can't thank you all enough. I feel like a "sponge" in here sometimes, just soaking in all the info. You make it seem so easy.

I owe you all a great deal. Thank you !!! Thank you !! Thank you !!