>I need to find out information about a field in a table. However, this field may not be in my currently selected table, and I do not want to use AFIELDS because it returns too much information to wade through. Specifcally, I need to know the type, size, and (if applicable) decimal precision of my field. I haven't found a native VFP function that will provide this information for a single field. A simple UDF seems to be my next option, so any suggestions in that direction would be appreciated.

Sorry, AFIELDS() is one of the few ways that can return all the information about a field like width and precision for numeric fields. You can get the number of decimal places, but not the width of a numeric field:

nWidth = 20
nDecimals  = nWidth - RAT(".",PADL(numericfield,nWidth))