When a procedure is doing a lot of work and taking a while, if the Datasheet is not the active window it’s hard to know that anything is happening. All you have is the pointer or i-beam cursor and an occasional blip of the beachball. The Datasheet on the other hand, shows a progress bar in the record count display while it’s running processes.
Can the beachball be activated along with that progress bar?
I’m not sure I’m following you, but let me give this my best shot.
Certain operations, like select and formula fill, show a progress bar in the toolbar as they work. This is not restricted to the Data Sheet, it will also appear in form windows if the toolbar is visible. Of course if the tool bar has been hidden, you can’t see the progress bar. At this time there is no way to specify a custom progress bar in your form for these internal operations.
The beachball cursor is a separate thing, controlled by Apple. If an application stops checking for events (mouse clicks and keyboard presses) for a while, Apple automatically switches the cursor to a beachball. When the application resumes checking for events, the cursor goes back to normal. As far as I know, though, there is no way for an application to explicitly control whether the beachball cursor appears or not – this is up to Apple’s code.
Ah yes, the hidden toolbar. That’s the problem, including if it’s set for Text Only. So feedback for the user requires having the icons in the Toolbar showing. I’ve tended to hide the Toolbar in forms.