I have an empty, formatted spreadsheet, that I created by writing a few rows
into it from my COBOL program, field by field, then deleting all of the
rows.

The process of creating the entire XLS or XLSX runs much too slow (100
records per minute or less), and uses memory up, so can never allow me to
finish converting some of my large CSV files into formatted XLS (Excel 2003)
or XLSX (Excel 2007) files. Someone told me to "turn off continual
re-calculating". How?

I wonder if I can somehow import my large .CSV file into my .XLS empty
formatted file? I cannot find a way. Any help would be appreciated.

TIA, Paul