Deleting Fields

[Sarah]

Is there a quick way of deleting fields no longer in use on any layout - without having to trawl through the Define Fields area and delete individually?

[richshone]

If I understand the question correctly, you can go to layout mode and click on each field you want to delete and either select cut from the menu bar or hit control x (on a Mac). If you want to delete more than one field at a time in a layout you can click on multiple fields while holding the shift key, and then doing the above. The other way to highlight multiple fields is to drag the mouse around the fields in question but they would all have to be in the same place on the page. If you do this you can however hold shift and click on the ones you DON'T want to delete and they will unselect (I sometimes hit control a which selects all of the fields in the layout and then deselect the ones I don't want if more than half of the said fields are to be deleted). The only downside to this is that this method only deletes the fields from the layout in question and not from the whole file, and the only way I know how to do this is to do it the way you are already aware of. Hope this helps!!

[Vaughan]

When you delete the field from "Define Fields" FMP also removes all references to the field from layouts and calculations. Is this what you are referring to?

Two different but similar concepts: field objects in layouts; and field definitions.

The field objects on layouts tell FMP where and how to display the data. These can easily be deleted, and can easily be replaced later.

The field definition tells FMP what data you want to store in the database itself. Deleting the field from "Define Fields" permanently removes the data from the database. There is no easy way to undo the deletion..