Excel 2013 takes a very long time to insert or delete rows after a custom sort on many named columns

Symptoms

You try to insert or delete rows in a Microsoft Excel 2013 worksheet. You do this after you sort a range that contains defined names that refer to whole columns. In this scenario, it takes a very long time to insert or delete rows.

Cause

This issue occurs because of the defined names. There are over one million rows per column in Excel 2013. If you refer to the whole column, all rows of the column are loaded into memory when you perform an operation on the column. Therefore, you encounter a performance issue when you insert or delete rows after sorting.

Workaround

To work around this issue, create a dynamic defined name on ranges instead of naming the whole column.

For more information about how to create a dynamic defined range in Excel, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

830287 How to create a dynamic defined range in an Excel worksheet