George,

I would use the Clean function and Trim functions on the data.
Remove all formatting, including any merged cells.
Save the file.
Then do your thing.

Jim Cone
San Francisco, USA

"Rolls" wrote in message ...
I have a daily exercise in which I copy a web-based datagrid and paste it
into an Excel workbook. It's typically up to 6,000 rows +/- and 15 columns
wide. It takes a while to paste. After that I block format remove
text-wrap and adjust row height and column widths to fit, change the
worksheet tab to a description name, then attempt to SAVE AS
"XXXX_YYYY-MM-DD.XLS".

At this point the worksheet usually becomes unresponsive but not always. If
I close Excel and then reopen it, the recovered file can eventually be
repaired and saved.

Is this a known problem? I suspect that it may have something to do with
non-visible html.

Are there any techniques to do this process faster and reliably?

George - Houston