It may be that Excel is having to use virtual memory for some reason.
There could be a very large number of disk accesses if this is the
case.

Rather then copying the data to the Clipboard and pasting it into the
new workbook, it might be faster to use the Move or Copy Sheet
function. (Edit|Move or Copy Sheet, or right-click on a sheet tab and
select from the popup dialog.)

Mark Lincoln

On Sep 27, 11:58 am, Mark wrote:
I have a 2.8ghz P4 with 1.75GB memory & 15gb free hard drive space, running
Windows 2000 & Office 2000.

I have opened a new Excel document, and an existing Excel file (13mb,
containing 13 columns and 48,606 rows of simple text data).

Can anyone please explain why when I select this data and copy it into
memory before copying it into the new spreadsheet, Excel runs at 100% cpu
usage, takes over 200mb memory and takes half an hour for a 13mb file?

If I try the same thing in another product (in this case, I am using sql
server 2000, which is installed on this machine), it takes milliseconds, with
minimal cpu & memory usage.