Find where and how objects are used in Salesforce.com

Question

I have recently taken up salesforce.com and I have very little idea about its workings and stuff. Recently I was going through some of the stuff and I had a doubt...

Is there any way through which I can find out where a particular field/ object/ visualforce page has been used in an application. For example, let's say I have a field labeled Sales, I want to be able to find where that particular field is used, under which object, and the object in which visualforce page/ Apex class, and the visualforce page/ Apex class is used in which application.

Hope I have made my Q clear.

Thanking everyone for their help

Answer 1

If you have a test environment (sandbox) - you could always try deleting the field there ;) I'm kidding but if you'll try it the page should display you a list where the field is being used.

A similar thing could be achieved by creating a changeset, adding that field to it and then checking dependencies.

But probably the best way would require some preparations upfront. Read about Force.com IDE (or Eclipse IDE) and how to use it to download files that represent your object definitions, page layouts, classes, visualforce pages, reports... This is great as a backup but also will let you search the files (Ctrl+H in Eclipse or just use whatever you want once you have the files locally). Search for API name of the field (similar to My_Custom_Field__c should be most effective.