How to make Excel pay attention to the clipboard

I use Excel 2013 for a few hours every day, and I really hate it. Outlook is worse, but most of the Office suite saps productivity rather than increasing it.

One example, which maybe someone can help me with, is this: I copy a record ID from Excel and paste it into a SQL query, which gives me a bunch of rows related to the record. Then I copy the rows and want to paste it into Excel and manipulate the data. When I press paste I get the single cell ID from Excel pasted in, rather than the data I've just copied to the clipboard. I then have to press ESC in Excel, then copy and paste in the data again. Why doesn't Excel just paste what I've copied to the clipboard?

All the workarounds we have to come up with Microsoft's idiosyncrasies results in great websites like superuser.com, but also lot of wasted time.