Why does Excel 2013 take so long to open up a CSV file and save it as an Excel file?

[montypython1]

Greetings,

Why does Excel 2013 take so long to open up a CSV file and save it as an Excel file?

I recently upgraded to Office 2013 and encountered an issue involving CSV files: When I open up a CSV file, there is no problem. But when I save the CSV file as either ".XLSX" or ".XLS", it can easily take over 2 minutes. The file save dialog box starts blinking as soon as I select the option for file type "Excel" or "Excel 97-2000" (Excel is locked during this time). Eventually the system will allow me to click the "Save" button. Note: I never had this problem with older versions of Excel.

Many of the files that I work with are in CSV format. Often, I choose to save these files in an Excel format (to preserve formatting), so this is an issue for me.

Any ideas on how to correct this?

Thanks,
Dave

 

[SkipVought]

Hi,

Excel can and will CHANGE certain data. So when you open a text file using Excel, Excel looks at each value and decides how to interpret the TEXT.

I would hardly ever use Excel to open a text file. Rather I would IMPORT the data into Excel, and specify the data type of each column. That faster and safer.

Skip,

_{Just traded in my OLD subtlety...
for a NUance!}

 

[montypython1]

Hi Skip,

Thanks for the reply. After I posted my question, I started encountering OTHER system speed issues, not just the time it takes to open a CSV file (all of which occurred immediately after installing Office 2013).

Many file functions seem to be taking way too long now. For example, saving an email attachment can take minutes (even though the file size is not large).

Any ideas of the cause?

Thanks,
Dave

 

[SkipVought]

Are things other than Office bogging down too?

Have you performed any cleanup utilities: defrag, checks etc?



Skip,

_{Just traded in my OLD subtlety...
for a NUance!}

 

[SkipVought]

BTW, I still would recommend IMPORT over OPEN for text files!!!

Skip,

_{Just traded in my OLD subtlety...
for a NUance!}

 

[montypython1]

It seems to mainly be the Office applications.

I wonder why I never had any problems with Office 2000 (the version that I just upgraded from)? Any file (CSV, TSV, XLS) would open quickly and without an issue.

 

[SkipVought]

FYI, you mentioned [highlight #E9B96E]two TEXT file types (csv, tsv)[/highlight] along with an Excel file type. Please do not confuse TEXT files with Excel files.

Skip,

_{Just traded in my OLD subtlety...
for a NUance!}

 

[montypython1]

Good point. However, with my old version of Office 2000, I was able to open up CSV, TSV (and of course XLS) files and quickly save them as XLS files. But with Office 2013 these text files open quickly, but they take several minutes to save as XLS or XLSX.

In my opinion, I shouldn't lose functionality by upgrading to 2013.

 

[SkipVought]

IMPORT, IMPORT, IMPORT!!!

Skip,

_{Just traded in my OLD subtlety...
for a NUance!}