Are you using CDBC? Some amount of server-side processing will be needed to avoid sending over records.

You can get an effective subset of a RecordSet using a RecordView (a subclass of RecordSet). You can set a RecordFilter on a RecordView that looks at a source RecordSet, and then set RecordGrid to point to that RecordView. (RecordGrid uses RecordView internally, which is why you can also set a RecordFilter on a RecordGrid.)

You could define a RecordFilter that returns true for a given ID and the next 99 records, for example, though this alone doesn't necessarily help with the network overhead. But if the main, server-connected RecordSet then loaded the next probable hundred records in the background, those new records would fail the filter test and not be displayed in the RecordGrid. The net effect would be, in this example, to have 200 local records at a time, of which half were displayed; every jump would have the server send a set purged of the hundred outdated records, keeping the hundred current (previously local but not displayed), and adding the next hundred (hidden).

There are likely other ways to produce the same effect.

On question of navigation appearance, are you using styled controls or the old UI? Do you have an example of how it doesn't meet your requirements or of how you would prefer it to look?