Dumb Newbie Questions -- 1 of N

[Peter Alcibiades]

Judy, maybe the issue with custom properties is that they are so simple? 
There is almost nothing there to get your head around.  

The thing I found completely blocking at first was, I kept asking myself, if
they are properties, they must be properties of something, so what is it
they are properties of, and how are they "properties"?  I kept thinking of
properties as being some sort of quality of an object, like color or size. 
It seems incomprehensible in retrospect that it can have seemed so
confusing.  But probably it was that the name hides something very very
simple!

The way to think of them is just fields.  Except they can be these funny
"fields" so to speak "on" a stack as well as on a card.  And the syntax for
getting stuff into them or reading from them is a little different.  And
they are invisible to the user.  But that is all they are.  If you can use
fields, you can use custom properties in about 30 seconds.  Though it took
me a lot longer than I'm going to admit to, to discover this!

One dimension of whether to store data in them is to what extent you want
your users to have independent access to their data.  If you want them to be
able to find it and move it to a different program if they feel like it,
probably out-of-program storage is going to be best.  I recently found it
reassuring to know that if I were to meet my maker, my suffering earth bound
users had all their data in tab separated text files which they could get
out in a flash and transfer to the database or spreadsheet of their choice. 

Storing in custom properties means they need Rev or your program to get at
it, no?  
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