>Surely an old question :) ...
>
>I have a file of about 500,000 records - file is about 40Mg in size.
>Records belong to 1 of 5 possible groups identified by a 20 char string field.
>There are about an equal number of records per group i.e. +/-100,000 per group.
>I want to allow the user to see only one chosen group of records at a time in a scrollable grid which has 3 colums.
>
>What is the fastest way to accomplish this? SET FILTER seems sluggish but perhaps I am not using it in the right way.
>
>TIA

Select records to cursor and use it as grid.recordsource. 3 fields by 100K records should be quick enough, but you can make it a bit faster by retrieving even less fields, i.e. primary key only would have to be included in Select, any other field is needed for sorting purpose only.