Excel 2011 copy and paste beachball hang freeze issue
The best answer to this issue appears here: Excel 2011 copy and paste beach ball hang issue.

Essentially:

You need to do this every time you freshly open the Excel program.


On starting up Excel, and before opening your Excel spreadsheet, open a new blank Excel spreadsheet. 
Perform a single copy and paste of an empty cell into another cell. 
Do this twice. Doing it twice is important. 
Close that spreadsheet, and without quitting Excel, open the spreadsheet you want to work on.  


The problem should now not occur. 

It seems that when a copy and paste is performed the first two times, Excel tries to do some mapping of all the relationships in the spreadsheet, and due to some coding issue, gets caught up in some long loops. Doing two copy and pastes first, with no big spreadsheets open satisfies this process with no vast spreadsheet to work through. Hence it avoids the long delay and apparent hang.