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[Lopezruy]

My pop. is rising fast, and idlers are through the roof! How do I micromanage them? Its getting kind of annoying. :S

[Tevish Szat]

Take each dwarf aside.  Set his/her skills and then give him/her a nickname or (if you like dwarven names) a custom profession name.  Those dwarves are "Done" and don't get messed with.  whenever new dwarves show, you can just set the skills of any that don't have nicknames, making managing them FAR easier.

You could also use "Dwarf therapist", as I'm sure some will suggest, but I personally find that the coward's way. 


EDIT: This may not solve your "idler" problem -- giving your dwarves specific roles is more a skill gain/quality measure.  To remove idlers, you need to make work.  May I suggest building a replica of St. Peter's Cathedral, Moscow?  DF needs more colorful Onion Domes.

[Lopezruy]

Yeah. I'm kind of searching for a way to keep them working whilst having a few leftover for things such as construction and military. I just have so many that they just sit around and have parties. Bothersome.

[smakemupagus]

You're using the manager to set lots of jobs, right?  Idlers aren't the end of the world as long as your fort has enough booze

[Loud Whispers]

1) Set labours for migrants the moment they arrive.

[no idlers]

[Snowdog]

Draft a large number of unskilled dwarves into a militia and throw them at the next siege.

[Blue_Dwarf]

Idlers through the roof... GENIUS!!!

[Jimmy]

When you have a population that has exceeded your needs for the pure survival aspects of the fortress, it's time to devote some effort into setting up your industries.

1. Create your military. Have a rotating three month schedule with one month training, one month patrolling, and one month off duty. Spread your veterans through your squads so the training goes faster. With three groups of squads, one will always be patrolling your entrance, one will be off duty but easily accessible for quick response, and one will be training to improve your squads. Ensure you either have the binary fix for long patrol thoughts, or have them assigned some very nice dining rooms and barracks.

2. Create your armorsmithing and weaponsmithing industries. Assuming you have access to wood, clear-cut your map and haul it all inside. Then have your wood burners work a dozen workshops on repeat until you have plenty of charcoal. Use this to repeat build large axe blades for training weaponsmithing and chain leggings for armorsmithing. Due to the way these are melted, they will actually return 150% of their cost in metal. Repeat melting these down will return 3 bars for every 2 used. It's something of an exploit, but allows you to constantly train these skills with a steady supply of fuel. This will ensure you have a well equipped army when the next siege arrives.

3. I personally like to smooth over all exposed walls in my fortress. Non-essential dwarves are given jobs doing this to keep them occupied. This might be a disadvantage if you plan to engrave later, as low skill will mean lower quality engravings. But skill level has no effect on simply smoothing, so feel free to have some useless migrants keep busy doing this.

4. Crafting trade goods from caravans and reselling them back can occupy a good number of useless immigrants. Enable leatherworking and clothesmaking and turn those bins of leather and cloth into trade goods. This trains legendary clothiers and leatherworkers quite quickly, meaning any leather armor you make will be far more likely to provide protection, and opens the possibility of using clothesmaking to create masterwork adamantine cloth cloaks for the ultra elite of your military.

[jellsprout]

You need to expand. There are a few solid options you can take.

-Increase your number of industries. Try to set up every industry in your fortress. Set up pig tail and dimple cup plots (or catch a GCS instead of the pig tail plots), create thread and dye, dye the thread and turn it into cloth, make clothes and sew images into these clothes. There you go, 7 dwarves (+haulers) doing a job.
-Expand your old industries. If you have enough metal, just build a few extra forges and assign some extra smiths. If you have sand on your map, you can increase your glass industry as far as you want.
-Improve your old industries. Set up an obsidian farm for an infinite source of those 3x value stones. Replace your dimple cup farms with sliver barbs or hide root. Replace all your tamed animals with giraffes.
-Increase your military. Assign as many dwarves as you can spare and train them. Use them to secure the surface, then the caverns and finally the basement.
-Build a megaproject.

[Mushroo]

Don't bother. Embrace the idlers. 1 legendary craftdwarf can create enough trade goods to buy out the entire caravan, and 2 legendary hammerdwarfs can beat back an entire goblin siege---so who cares if there are 100 idlers?

[i2amroy]

Take each dwarf aside.  Set his/her skills and then give him/her a nickname or (if you like dwarven names) a custom profession name.  Those dwarves are "Done" and don't get messed with.  whenever new dwarves show, you can just set the skills of any that don't have nicknames, making managing them FAR easier.

Pretty much this here. Note that Dwarf Therapist can also make this process 20x faster through use of the custom profession function.

And here are a few things about idlers:
1)Get used to them. After all you are a dwarf fortress, not a labor camp. Just because you have a gemcutter doesn't mean there will always be gems to cut.
2)Something that can be used to reduce the number of idlers slightly is to set up some "dwarven exercise machines". Basically you create a screw pump in a room somewhere and then set it to be pumped manually. Then just enable pump operating on any dwarves that you want to work out on the machine. The end result is that your dwarves spend time working on the pumps, building strength and toughness.

[Larix]

4. [...]opens the possibility of using clothesmaking to create masterwork adamantine cloth cloaks for the ultra elite of your military.

Minor notes:
-adamantine clothes still are subject to wear/rot. Those cloaks might be spiffy and effective, but they're not forever.
-adamantine everything takes much more material than any other type of crafting. Just like a bluemetal spear takes three wafers, a cloak will take several (wiki suggests five) bolts of cloth.
-ahem. Adamantine clothes are not made by clothesmakers. They're produced at the forge by armoursmiths, heading "Metal Clothing".
(exception: adamantine cloth artefacts - those _are_ made by clothiers, and cloaks are a distinct possibility. As artefacts, they don't wear out and would also only take 1-3 bolts to make, like is the norm for artefacts. Of course, you can't govern what comes out of the artefacting process - you could just as well get a single shoe. And you only get one shot per dwarf...)