Excel Memory Issues

[TXSteveO]

I have a problem when I open Excel, it will not let me save anything. It says
I don't have enough free memory and I have 13 gigs free on the primary drive.
I have a Sony 3.2 ghz laptop with a gig of ram. I can't even save a blank
spreadsheet. Has anyone else seen this?

 

[Gord Dibben]

The 13 gigs free on the primary drive has nothing to do with RAM

You have 1 gig of RAM...........what else have you got running along with Excel?

Close a few things down and see what happens.

I have 512 mb RAM and don't have any problems with Excel unless I am running too
many applications.

CAD to open the Task Manager.

Click on "Performance" tab and see what your total and available Physical Memory
are doing.


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP

 

[JLatham]

Also, make sure of the wording of the message - that it says memory and not
resources.

While you are in Task Manager, besides looking at the available memory
numbers, you might look at the Processes tab and see what processes are using
huge amounts of memory.

I'm running Office 2007 on this system and have a HUGE (6+MB) Excel file
open and it's physical memory usage is 60,692K (call it 61Meg). With no .xls
file open, it shows about 39,960K (not quite 40 M) in use by Excel. That's
all in the Processes tab.

Over in the Performance tab, with Excel, Outlook, and two active tabs in IE
7 and another application running, I show 1,534,884 of 2,096,364 K available
(has 2 GB installed). And 1 or 2% of my AMD 64 X2 4800+ being used <g> with
50 processes running.

Are all .xls files giving you the problem, or just one? If just one, what's
'special' about it? Lots of links, controls, worksheets in general?

 

[TXSteveO]

It says, "Microsoft Office Excel cannot open or save any more documents
because the is not enough memory or disk space" I have 13 gigs free on the
drive and 425 megs of ram free.

 

[JLatham]

This may not be an Excel problem directly. You haven't said which version of
Windows you are using? Could be a Windows setting causing you to get locked
out. No problems with any programs besides Excel? If it is only Excel,
possibly a repair install of Office may cure it.

Best I can offer is to point to some other places you might look and see if
anything is odd:

Right-Click My Computer and choose Properties. Go to the [Advanced] tab and
click on [Settings] in the 'Performance' group. Click the [Advanced] tab in
the Performance Options window and look for the 'Virtual memory' group. The
"Total paging file size for all drives" setting should not be anywhere close
to your 13GB left on the drive. Somewhere around 1 to 3 GB for your system
should be fine. If it appears way too big, click the [Change] button. If
the Custom Size option is chosen, you should have it set to Initial Size
around 2046 and Maximum Size around 4092 (that should be plenty). If System
managed size is chosen, you should leave it alone.

A second thing you might look at:
Open My Computer and right-click on the C: drive (where I presume you have
your program files), and then choose [Properties] for the drive. Look for
the "Quota" tab, click it and see if Quotas are enabled. If you are on a
single system, not on a domain, it should not be turned on. If it is, it
could be the reason you're getting a short-on-drivespace message.

I've seen Excel give a warning about too little memory when things get
really busy, loaded up on a system. I've seen that at my office where I deal
with a 2.4GHz P4 system with 512MB, and in that case it usually clears up
after shutting a few things down (including Excel) and then being more
spartan in choosing how much to try to run at once.


You might try asking about this over in the Windows GQ area also? I think
this is a situation where two lines of research might be acceptable.
http://www.microsoft.com/communitie...a1e-b269-4291-b6b4-dc2d504ce9ef&lang=en&cr=US