hi. in my experience: 1. "recovered file fragments" is a MS naming of .chk files. and probaly other rhings it doesn't know about. 2. if you remove a variable from the .QES and try to enter data the error message will appear saying that the variable name you have in the .CHK is an UNKNOWN COMMAND. 3. so, the answer to your question is: no, Epidata will not remove from the .chk variables which have been removed from the .QES. you'll have to do this yourself...at least it's what I have to do.

-----Original Message----- From: epidata-list@lists.umanitoba.ca [mailto:epidata-list@lists.umanitoba.ca] Sent: Tue 11/15/2005 3:14 PM To: epidata-list@lists.umanitoba.ca Cc: Subject: [EpiData-list] new to epidata: 2 questions

I'm fairly new to Epidata and have a couple of questions: 1 In the file manager, the check file I've created has "recovered file fragments" as the file type. Is that correct? 2 I've discovered I need to delete a number of variables from the data file. This seems straightforward since I can simply delete them from the .qes file and they will be deleted from the .rec file. What happens to the .chk file when I open the new .rec file with deleted variables? Will Epidata revise the .chk file by deleting the checks for variables that no longer exist? Many thanks for any help. Richard Herrell NIMH --------------------------------- Yahoo! FareChase - Search multiple travel sites in one click.