EXCEL 2013 is a slow, clunky program. Simple copy-paste between formula-free CSV files can take upwards of five minutes per cell on a very powerful tower.

Have moved between various computers and performance is consistently terrible.

Bad, bad performing, brittle software. Will be moving over to Google sheets once EXCEL subscription ends. Time is too valuable.

Hi ljenish,

Normally copy or paste operations in Excel are pretty instantaneous. You copy data from one place and then paste into a cell in Excel. Pretty straightforward. But what do you do if you notice that copy and paste seems to take an excessively long time when doing a paste in Excel?

And you said you copy and paste between >>formula-free CSV files<<, could you tell me whats the meaning of formula-free? And I suggest you import CSV files but not copy and paste them. You can change the separator character that is used in both delimited and .csv text files. This may be necessary to make sure that the import or export operation works the way that you want it to.

You can import data from a text file into an existing worksheet as an external data range.

1. Click the cell where you want to put the data from the text file.
2. On the Data tab, in the Get External Data group, click From Text.

The Get External Data group on the Data tab

1. In the Address bar, locate and double-click the text file that you want to import.
2. In the Import Data dialog box, do the following:
   • Optionally, click Properties to set refresh, formatting, and layout options for the imported data.
   • Under Where do you want to put the data?, do one of the following:
     • To return the data to the location that you selected, click Existing worksheet.
     • To return the data to the upper-left corner of a new worksheet, click New worksheet.
3. Click OK.Excel puts the external data range in the location that you specify.

Hope this method can help you improve your excel performance when using CVS file.

Regards,

George Zhao
TechNet Community Support