Currently in FM 6, I have several files holding people information at our school. (Teachers, students, alumni, parents, former parents, trustees). It is a nightmare.

I was hoping to consolidate this into one file called People. My intent was to filter each office with just the people that they need to see. Development sees alumni, parents, former parents. The Registrar office sees students, parents. College Office just sees 12th graders, etc.

I tried to implement this using privilege sets and restricting access by calculation. The problem is that I either see <no access> to the records that I don't want to see OR the status bar says 100 records out of 30,000, for example. I don't want to eliminate the status bar if I don

You say trapping for Show All Records is "crufty" :-). Well, perhaps it is. While FileMaker will automatically filter Finds according to record-level access restrictions, it will execute the command to Show All Records; but will show restricted records as <no access>. Hard to say whether that's useful, but it is the way it is. It could be that FileMaker's internal processes make it this way; Show All bypasses the Find mechanism, so it cannot "filter" record sets. It is very fast; and I'm glad it is. Record-level access has a definite speed hit; they are minimizing that.

It's not terribly difficult to deal with. You just have to set up a relationship on an unstored calculation field, which uses either the Account Name, or the Privilege Set, to go to their records. I believe this also comes into play when they open the file, so it really is necessary.

This has been recently discussed. One helpful trick is to filter their records BEFORE they get to the "filtered" table. In other words, control navigation to that table from another central table which does NOT have record-level access restrictions. Then you avoid the "landed on a record they can't access, so can't even resolve the calculation field, hence relationship" dilemma.

As far as Record Count, pretty much the same thing. You're wanting FileMaker to filter something which is designed to not be filtered. What difference does it make anyway, whether the user sees the true record count? If you want to take control of the situation, then hide and lock the status bar, create a calculation that counts their self-relationship. That will be "their" total record count.

Count ( self-relationship::field always having data)

You cannot give people with restrictions "All" editing privileges. Navigation must be controlled by buttons and scripts. That's a given (and the only safe and sane policy).

If anyone has any other/better ideas, I'm all ears.

Set up a custom menu for each class of user; the specific menu layout is selected by calculation based on user class. Their scripts will then take them just to those areas of the database you want them to see.