Excel Cut&Paste causes 30 seconds "Not Responding", yet Copy&Paste is instant ?

[mantadiver123]

I have Win 10 & Office 365 and a spreadsheet file with 4,000 rows x 750 columns. The file size if 32mb but most of that is imported data.

Copy & Paste is instant but when I Cut & Paste (via menu or shortcut) the CPU & Memory rise and I get "Not Responding" for around 30 seconds, even when cutting a single cell.

Eventually it gets there.

Task manager reports anywhere between 400-550 mb of ram being utilised (but I have 64gb available) and cpu usage falls back to zero but gets upto 20% & stops responding during the cut/paste.

It's definitely an issue in the sheet itself because if I create a copy & delete all but 100 or so columns Cut & Paste happens in a second or two. One thing I have noticed is that Excel doesn't seem to give back the memory so as I tried deleting segments of the spreadsheet the memory count kept rising to 1.5gb ?

I have repaired office, clean booted the pc, tried excel safe mode, manual calculation, removed all formatting & conditional formatted, no macros or VB).

Spent hours trawling the forums, tried all that I've found but most issues seem to relate to copy & paste not just Cut & Paste specifically.

I am trying to understand a) Why does the cut & paste becomes so slow as the spreadsheet gets larger when copy & paste remains instant & b) is there anything I can do about it ?


Any help very much appreciated.

[Richard Buttrey]

Hi and welcome to the forum

Are you copying/pasting eactly the same range as the cut/paste operation?

Here's a link which explains the subtle difference

[mantadiver123]

Thank you for taking the time to respond & so quickly Richard, much appreciated.

I have read the link and can see that Cut & Paste would be drastic on a complex sheet with many formulae. In my case the delay appears to be the same irrespective of whether I Cut & Paste a blank unformatted cell with no precedents or dependants or a cell with a formula.

Could it be that Excel insists on "checking" every other populated cell just to see if any changes are required as a result of the Cut & Paste ?