Craig:
Thanks. When I said "obscure way", I meant a function that I had never heard of which either 1) return grid row numbers for non-active rows (the way that ActiveRow and RelativeRow return the row number for active rows), or 2) return the record's position when indexed (the way that RECNO() does for the table's natural order).
I just ran a SQL SELECT on the table, using a dummy with the same structure and 300,000 records. I had the index set to TAG PhoneNumber, and did a simple "SELECT * FROM TableName ORDER BY PhoneNumber". It took nearly 6 minutes. SET TALK was OFF, and nothing big was running in the background. I need to be able to update the grid nearly instantaneously. Can it be optimized better?

Jerry