Before you change or delete a Salesforce field, you need to know what depends on it. The Insights tab shows every piece of metadata that uses a selected field, so you can see the impact of a change before you make it.

This article covers where a field is used. To see how much a field is actually filled in on your records, see Field utilization.

Select any field on a standard or custom object in the metadata dictionary, then open the Insights tab in the right panel. Elements lists the metadata components that use that field.

Each component links to its Salesforce setup page or to its place in the metadata dictionary. Hover over a component to see a pop-up describing how it uses the field.

For a visual view of the same relationships, open the metadata dependency tree or grid from the top of the section.

Elements checks whether a field is used by the following metadata types:

Field usage inside Apex is traced from the code, and a few Apex structures are not yet supported. A field used only in one of these will not appear in the Insights list:

Because of its unusual data model, Elements syncs all Person Account metadata under the Account object, with the prefix Person: followed by the dependent metadata name.

Dependencies on Person Account fields are only reported once the dependent component has been modified. For a report, list view or other component that uses a Person Account field to appear in the Insights tab, its last modified date in Salesforce needs to change. Any edit to that component is enough.

A field with no dependencies listed in the Insights tab is not used by any of the metadata types Elements checks, but that is not proof it is unused. Check the Apex limitations above, and check how much the field is populated in Field utilization - a field nothing references can still hold data your users rely on.

A dependency can be missing from the Insights tab for three reasons: it was added after your last completed Salesforce sync, it sits in one of the unsupported Apex structures listed above, or it is on a Person Account field whose dependent component has not been modified.