Reading a large CSV file into Excel's data model is somewhat slow compared to R:
I used some VBA code for the timing. The only thing we do is to load data into the data model (i.e. there is no Power Pivot table to create).
R does this quite a bit faster:
I expected this to be closer. I think this operation should be IO bound instead of CPU bound, something Microsoft should know how to do super fast.
| Reading CSV into data model |
R does this quite a bit faster:
| Reading the same CSV into R |