Packing Tables
Another excellent question, this time from Verna in CG county. She originally posted it as a comment on another blog entry, but I wanted to separate it out so that you'd all find it easier. She asks "When you pack tables can you select all files at once?"
If you're not familiar with what "packing tables" means, it's a process that you should do maybe once a year (right after year-end processing is a good time) to compress all your data files. Data files are like elastic waistbands, in that they grow as large as they need to in order to hold all the records within them. Unfortunately, though, they don't shrink back up when all that space is not needed (kind of like waists...). So, periodically, it's a good idea to pack the tables, which is basically like burping them--forces all the unused space out, makes them as small as they can be again. It cleans up many potential problems, and also can speed up access times a bit.
The answer? You can indeed pack tables all at one time. There is no danger to that, because Blue Ribbon does them one at a time anyway. It's going to pack Youth2a.db before it goes on to Youth2b.db. For more information about packing tables, see the Helpsheet.