Marcia:

It has been such a long time! I hope you and Andy are well. I take it that you are not working on any more new books or have you had a change of heart?

Yes, your idea is very workable. This thing is on a web site and it would be easy for me to change the front end routine to only do this once a day and ideally in the middle of the night.

Because I am not familiar with SQL I was really trying to find out if records could be removed somehow using SQL with less time than packing. But the tone of this thread seems to be that packing is best but to do it more efficiently.

Thanks for your reply Marcia and all the best!

Mike Smith