A field that nobody fills in is usually a field nobody needs. The Utilization tab shows what percentage of your Salesforce records have a value in each field, so you can find unused fields and decide what to clean up.

This article covers how much a field is used. To see which metadata depends on a field, see Where is a field used.

Select the field you want to investigate in the metadata dictionary, then open the Insights tab and its Utilization sub-tab in the right panel. A bar chart shows how populated the field is on each record type it is used on.

Select the parent object instead, and open the same Utilization sub-tab. A bar chart lists every field on the object with its percentage population. This figure is an aggregate across all records on the object and is not broken down by record type.

Below the chart you can see when the population data was last fetched and when the Org last synced. Select View all to open the full list of fields on the object with their population.

By default, Elements calculates population with an automatic weekly job that runs on Saturdays and samples up to the 10,000 most recent records on each object.

To calculate population across more than 10,000 records, schedule the Record Information job in the Elements managed package. The scheduled job also fills in the gaps listed under Limitations below. See Elements Managed Package Setup for how to schedule it.

When the Record Information job is not scheduled, population data is subject to four limits:

The Salesforce Knowledge object model exposes a set of abstract objects that are not used directly when articles are created. For this reason, the metadata dictionary only shows the concrete Knowledge__kav object for knowledge article versions in Lightning Knowledge.

Because of Salesforce limitations, population is not available for these standard Knowledge fields:

A field shows no population data when it is a formula field, sits on a managed package object, or has only been filled in on records created in the last 7 days. All three are limits of the default weekly job and are lifted by scheduling the Record Information job in the Elements managed package.

A low population means few records hold a value, but the field may still be referenced by automation, reports or page layouts. Before deleting it, check where the field is used.