How to keep it from looking like its locked up

[Bill-E-BoB]

I wrote a program that uses an excel spreadsheet as source data to access mainframe systems and perform various functions, and while its running everything works great but if the user tries to click on their excel spreadsheet it looks like the computer is locked up. Its not really locked up, but looks it because it can't display excel until the program finishes. So, when users see this, they think something is wrong...open their task manager, and shut it down in the middle of its process screwing up all sorts of stuff. Is there a way I can either make excel look normal, completely hide excel so they don't mess with it, or give them some sort of status indicator that lets 'em know the program is still running? Everything is written in the VBA editor within excel.

[VBA Noob]

See if a progress bar works. Here's some examples

http://www.xcelfiles.com/ProgressBar.html

http://www.andypope.info/vba/pmeter.htm

http://www.cpearson.com/excel/Progress.htm

http://www.dailydoseofexcel.com/arch.../progress-bar/

VBA Noob

[Bill-E-BoB]

The problem with a progress bar is that users won't see it because other applications run on top of excel while this is going. What if I just use a doevents command during ever loop, will that make it so that excel will appear correctly when they try to look at it? If I do that I can keep a progress bar in the spreadsheet which will remain visible for them when they need to see it...