Way to find blank fields across all records?

[deego55]

I am working on a solution for a client that is using FM5.5. There are about 700 records and 500 fields. Is there an easy way to get a list of the fields that contain no data in any record? Any help ASAP would be appreciated.

[Ender]

Is this a one-time kind of thing? Certainly this structure should be normalized in the future.

[deego55]

the current system is very messy. i need to do an analysis of what fields actually contain data. in the future it will be normalized somehow.

[Ender]

I don't think there's a shortcut for this.

If possible, I'd recommend an analysis utility like Metadata Magic to tell you if there are any fields that are not used anywhere. This should eliminate some. For the rest, I'd just put all the regular data fields on a layout, and go through each one, searching for = to find those that are empty (if no records found, the field is not used.)