# Why does it take so long to Export a spreadsheet to a csv file?
**URL:** https://discourse.paraview.org/t/why-does-it-take-so-long-to-export-a-spreadsheet-to-a-csv-file/3522
**Category:** ParaView Support
**Created:** [February 6, 2020, 6:00pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/why-does-it-take-so-long-to-export-a-spreadsheet-to-a-csv-file/3522 "2020-02-06T18:00:04Z")
**Posts on this page:** 6
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@DaleKramer](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/DaleKramer)
#### Post date: [February 6, 2020, 6:00pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/why-does-it-take-so-long-to-export-a-spreadsheet-to-a-csv-file/3522/1 "2020-02-06T18:00:04Z")
I have a 6 million row spreadsheet that can be ‘sorted’ in the ParaView environment almost instantly.
But when I export just a single column of that data to a ~40mb csv file, it takes about 4 hours.
Is this normal?
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### Author:  [@mwestphal](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/mwestphal)
#### Post date: [February 7, 2020, 2:40am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/why-does-it-take-so-long-to-export-a-spreadsheet-to-a-csv-file/3522/2 "2020-02-07T02:40:04Z")
a “spreadsheet” in ParaView is a vtkDataObject that is stored in memory in easy-to-access efficient way.
In the other hand, the csv format is an inefficient, text based format.
More over, our csv writer is a bit old and could be redesigned to be a little bit more efficient so that the only bottleneck is the time to write the data on disk. Do not expect miracle though.
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### Author:  [@DaleKramer](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/DaleKramer)
#### Post date: [February 7, 2020, 8:15pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/why-does-it-take-so-long-to-export-a-spreadsheet-to-a-csv-file/3522/3 "2020-02-07T20:15:22Z")
Thanks for the insight…
As a hobby programmer for over 40 years I just had to see how an ancient programming language (but still my goto language for simple tasks) would do under similar conditions. I would think there is much room for improvement with your csv writing of 6,000,000 rows 😉
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### Author:  [@wascott](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/wascott)
#### Post date: [February 7, 2020, 10:56pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/why-does-it-take-so-long-to-export-a-spreadsheet-to-a-csv-file/3522/4 "2020-02-07T22:56:03Z")
[https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/issues/19666](https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/issues/19666)
This does not impact my users, and I don’t think it will, so I did not pick it up.
Thanks for reporting.
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### Author:  [@mwestphal](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/mwestphal)
#### Post date: [February 8, 2020, 5:24am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/why-does-it-take-so-long-to-export-a-spreadsheet-to-a-csv-file/3522/5 "2020-02-08T05:24:26Z")
@DaleKramer : Haha, nice one. Well it’s a good news then 🙂 .
Here is a list of csv related issues if anyone want to fix them in a batch :
[https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/issues/19666](https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/issues/19666)
[https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/issues/12761](https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/issues/12761)
[https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/issues/19239](https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/issues/19239)
[https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/issues/18185](https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/issues/18185)
[https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/issues/17632](https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/issues/17632)
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### Author:  [@DaleKramer](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/DaleKramer)
#### Post date: [February 8, 2020, 11:36am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/why-does-it-take-so-long-to-export-a-spreadsheet-to-a-csv-file/3522/6 "2020-02-08T11:36:38Z")
I would love to dabble but I am afraid my C skills are limited to some microprocessor firmware coding.