Well, it's not quite the piece of cake that's been suggested. I've
found that it helps considerably to lay a lot of groundwork before
doing the copying and pasting. And it'll save you work if you do the
steps in the proper order. Assuming the place where the layout
currently lives is the "Source" file and the place where you want to
recreate it is the "Target" file ...
(1) Make sure that all the value lists that exist in "Source" have
been meticulously recreated in "Target", with identical names. Then,
to be on the safe side, change the value lists in "Source" so that
they refer to their counterparts in "Target" (unless, of course,
they're going to end up living on separate computers, or for those
value lists that depend on fields that only exist in "Source").
(2) Make sure that every external file reference that's represented
on the layout in "Source" has an identically named counterpart in
"Target".
(3) Do likewise with every TO (table occurrence).
(4) Do likewise with every field name. (This is a good excuse to
regularize your field names in both files, something you should
probably do as a matter of good database hygiene in any case.)
(5) Create a layout in "Target" that has the proper name and refers
to the proper table. Do this before you put anything on it but, more
particularly, before you import any scripts that might refer to that
layout.
(6) Make sure that every script that's referenced on your layout in
"Source" has an identically named counterpart in "Target". Also make
sure that every script that refers to that layout has been duplicated
in "Target". This is more of a challenge than it might seem, since
many of the scripts will be connected to buttons and not readily
visible. Fortunately, FMP makes it easy to import scripts from
"Source" to "Target".
(7) If "Source" was designed on a Windows machine and you're moving
to a Mac, probably no problem. Mac fonts make more efficient use of
space than Windows PCs do, so you won't experience any crowding.
OTOH, if you've designed "Source" on a Mac and "Target" is running
under Windows, you'll probably have to expand all your fields
vertically by 14-20% and horizontally by 5-10%. I recommend doing
that in "Source" before doing any copying, just in case you ever need
to redeploy that layout again under Windows.
(8) After the above, you're ready to copy and paste the layout.
(9) As a byproduct, you're also in a position to import the data from
"Source" to "Target" if that should prove desirable. I've had
occasion to do this multiple times since FMI gave us the ability to
have multiple tables in a single file. I'm gradually shrinking the
total number of files at each of the installations I'm responsible
for by importing many of them as new tables into a central master
file, but it's a painstaking process, and you shouldn't plan on just
tossing it off casually in an afternoon. FWIW, I usually name that
central master file something non-descriptive (not "People" or
"Receipts", for instance) but evocative of what the organization does
("Lassie", "Georgia" [O'Keefe], [Leonard] "Bernstein",
"Aaron" [Copland], "Fred" [erick Douglass], etc.). The tables within,
of course, all have names meaningful for the entities they contain.
