Suppress Word's status bar text while allowing text set from a macro?

[DocA]

Hi,

Is there a way to suppress the text that Word writes to the status bar,
while enabling a macro to write its own text?

Part of my code involves multiple find and replace, during which Word writes
"Word is replacing...." to the status bar. I want to suppress this text so
that text I set earlier in my code "Statusbar = "MyText" takes precedence.
However, whene I do this my text only stays on the screen until Word's own
text appears. I want it to stay on the screen until my entire macro has
finished running.

If I can't suppress Word's text then I guess I can add code to make my text
appear and stay on the screen every so often for a few seconds, although I
don't really like this as it delays execution of the rest of the code.

Thanks,

Adrian