Excel 365 - Copy / paste causes spinning beachball

[pedal999]

I'm looking for suggestions as to the cause / solution to a spinning beachball every time I try and copy/paste in Excel. This happens more on some spreadsheets, but is happening in one I use frequently which is only 700kb.
I am using Office 365, and my MBP is 2018 (2.6 GHz i7, 32GB RAM), running Catalina.
It does however seem independent of device, as I recreated it on my partners MacBook Air (2011, 2.0GHz i7, 8GB RAM) running High Sierra. The desired file is stored locally but mirrored in iCloud).

I am aware that was a problem in Office 2011 for Mac, but my online search hasn't found posts with this problem recently. I have tried an older suggested workaround of copy/pasting a blank cell in a blank spreadsheet before opening the desired file as suggested at Excel 2011 copy and paste beachball hang freeze issue

I have also tested with desired file mirrored on a different cloud, and also just saved locally without any cloud mirroring, - all have similar problems.

A spindump is available at https://gist.github.com/KathParamedic/6b13f7556c76e8ba0255579e2f3322d6

Thanks in anticipation

 

[chscag]

Welcome to our forums.

You must be an early riser or just staying up late looking at the time of your post. I'm not an Excel user but some of our members are and may be able to help.

Does the spinning beachball occur just when trying to copy/paste to Excel or does it happen with other apps or functions?

 

[toMACsh]

Welcome to our forums.

You must be an early riser or just staying up late looking at the time of your post. I'm not an Excel user but some of our members are and may be able to help.

OP time on my screen is 10:53PM, whereas your post time is reported as 12:30AM. I'm on Central Time (US) like you, so..... what?

Since the problem is not device-specific, maybe the file/files is/are corrupt somehow. Perhaps try this on a smallish file: Open an new Excel blank document, copy and paste from the old file, including formatting. This might be frustrating, as copy/paste is the problem, but, if you can get everything to the new file, then you can test how well copy/paste works.

 

[chscag]

OP time on my screen is 10:53PM, whereas your post time is reported as 12:30AM. I'm on Central Time (US) like you, so..... what?

Did you miss the OP's profile or perhaps I'm reading your reply wrong? The OP is located in Wales, UK which is 6 Hours ahead of CDST.

 

[pedal999]

Welcome to our forums.

You must be an early riser or just staying up late looking at the time of your post. I'm not an Excel user but some of our members are and may be able to help.

Does the spinning beachball occur just when trying to copy/paste to Excel or does it happen with other apps or functions?

I use spreadsheets more than anything else, and (from memory), haven’t noticed it occurring with other apps.

Re corrupt file potential.. this was my first thought - as from experience I have noticed that Excel file size balloons occasionally, especially with ‘excess formatting’. SoI’ve both removed excess formatting via Windows Excel, and separately copied / pasted into a new file, which (from memory) resolved the issue for a very short time.
I will try again when I have time this week, as it’s a lengthy process to ensure all formulae still work.

Thanks

 

[toMACsh]

Did you miss the OP's profile...

I did overlook that.

 

[pedal999]

Hi,
After many many frustrating hours, Apple tried to help, and tested lots of things remotely. but ultimately directed me to Microsoft, as I use O365..
Almost immediately I was referred to their linked (paid) troubleshooting service, with 15 mins free advice on first use.
They were pretty much no use, especially as the tech I spoke to said it would take longer than 15 mins so he couldn't help. I pleaded for 15 min discussion so I could understand better what I could rule in / out, and at the end of that I was fairly certain I knew the cause, as everything else had been ruled out.
So to help others:-
Conditional formatting !!
On lots of my spreadsheets I use conditional formatting, and when I looked at the conditional formatting rules - they had effectively duplicated themselves many many times, and so each copy / paste was trying to recalculate whether the formatting needed to change.
Solution:
This was actually relatively simple - delete all conditional formatting and then recreate as appropriate from scratch - was a lot quicker than it would have been to recreate the spreadsheet with values and build the formulae back in.

Vary relieved.