Excel manages to process it in real time.

Yep for all its faults it's an impressive program.

In fairness to Excel, I think most of it's faults are more down to user misuse (eg people creating "databases" in Excel) rather than problems with the package itself.

Though Excel's handling of CSV can sometimes be a little troublesome - particularly with date / time fields. And I wish it support Open Document Spreadsheet (.ODS). But the former is a fringe case and the latter is obviously just a business decision. So, as you say, it's a very impressive program.