My user is running on Windows XP, and is complaining that he can easily lose the cursor when he is entering data. The cursor is small and it blinks very slowly. I suggested that he change that in the Control Panel but he claims it had no effect and since I am working on a Mac I cannot verify that. Is this a configurable option?

Straight for WinXP help:

To adjust the cursor blink rate

Open Keyboard in Control Panel.

On the Speed tab, drag the Cursor blink rate slider.

The test cursor to the left of the slider area blinks at the new rate.

Notes

To open Keyboard, click Start, point to Settings, click Control Panel, and then double-click Keyboard.

To prevent the cursor (insertion point) from blinking, drag the slider to the left end of the bar. The cursor will remain visible, but will not blink.

As I said in the original post ... the control panel did not (according to the user) make any difference ... and I wondered if this was a FileMaker issue. (I use a Mac and I occasionally lose the insertion point too.)

Sorry about that, I didnt read your post thoroughly. I can at least confirm that changing the Cursor rate through the control panel does change the speed for most applications but does not appear to affect FileMaker.

One thing that might help is to use a light colored (tannish for example) background color and make your input fields white with a lighter than black border. The current field is highlighted with a black border and this may help in a small way.

Also, you can change the indent on the cursor (and the text). Go to Format > Line Spacing > Custom and indent. Indent from left 5 px minimum. The cursor will then be visible to the User and not directly against the left margin (where it is easily missed). Text entered in fields also look better this way.

You can also have every field entered highlight when the cursor lands in it. This 'highlight' effect (vs. 7 only) makes tracking cursor location a piece of cake. It's an easy thing to do. Make your body your highlight color. Place a rectange over the entire layout (or the body line if list view). Set your fields to Arrange > Bring To Front and change your layout (Layout > Layout Setup) to not show field frames when field is active. Set each field to transparent background. When cursor lands in them, they will display the layout body (highlight) underneath. I use this for all data entry layouts where cursor location is important.

Thanks for the suggestions and confirmation that FileMaker seems to be overriding Windows settings.

I'll try out your suggestion because I am sure the alignment is part of the problem and I'll also see if the color settings make a difference.

It seems to me that if FM is not observing the OS definitions that it should be treated as a bug. I'll see what I can do about that.

It appears to me that Filemaker 7's text entry/editing and text rendering routines have been custom written and do not use any OS settings either on Windows or Mac. And it's not even consistent between field data entry mode and database definition mode. It has become very cumbersome and ugly in my opinion. Good luck with your bug report.