if you know how long something will take, then you can monitor it with the status bar
eg you have 80 items to process, and you are doing these one at a time, then you can use the dotted progress bar at the bottom left of the screen
look at help on SysCmd object
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please note that this wont work if you are just running a query that takes a long time - it works if you are running code in a loop, so that yuo can modify the status bar as the loop iterations increase