Excel Freezes When Deleting Columns

Got a LARGE spreadsheet from a client. Main sheet has a used range of about A1:HQ69000, although the actual data only goes through column BJ. I need to delete some of the columns.
Sheet is NOT filtered. Columns I'm trying to delete are either empty, or contain fixed values that have no dependents.
If I try to delete even one single column, Excel goes into "Not Responding" immediately, and just hourglasses me forever (like 20+ minutes, until I give up and press -Esc-, at which point I get the "whiteout" effect and have to go to Task Manager to end Excel).
Is there any way around this?
I'm running Excel 2007 on a Windows 8 desktop with a Core i5 CPU.

Originally Posted by davesexcel

Possibly set calculations to manual before you do this

Tried that, no help. Deleted ONE column, let it churn for 40+ minutes, still had to use Task Manager to kill it in the end.

This is what happened to Apple iPhones:

"Many customers had long suspected that Apple slowed down older iPhones to encourage people to upgrade when a new one was released.

In 2017, the company confirmed it did slow down some models as they aged, but not to encourage people to upgrade.

The French watchdog said iPhone owners "were not informed that installing iOS updates (10.2.1 and 11.2) could slow down their devices"."

Not sure if the same is done with our Excel. I have also experienced same thing with large files with my Excel 2016 after recent upgrades.