Not enough memory when pasting RTF from excel to word

[Unique Landscaping]

Mac OS 10.3.9
PowerPC G4
Word X
640 MB SBRAM

Whenever I paste formatted text from excel to word, I get the error "not
enough memory or disk space to complete the operation." I have cleared the
clipboard and restarted several times. I¹m not sure where else to look.
This computer is old as dirt but has previously worked fine.

I would upgrade to Word 2004 at least, but currently in our small office, I
am manually importing contacts and calendar events to the owner¹s computer,
which is running Word 2004.

I am trying to get the owner to go ahead and upgrade this pc to take care of
several problems so we can also get mobile me for our contact/calendar
sharing as that seems to be the easiest way to solve some of these problems.

Thanks so much for any helpful pointers.

gitane

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi gitane;

Has Office X been fully updated (10.1.9 is the most recent)? I don't know
that it will remedy the situation but it may help. Your observation
pertaining to limited resources is the most likely contributor, however. If
the system runs short on RAM (and 640 MB really isn't much) it will attempt
to use free disk space as virtual memory, so as your HD fills up this is
more & more likely to present as a "shortage".

FWIW & IMHO: I wouldn't even consider upgrading that Mac. For less [or very
little more] than what the upgrade would cost you can replace it with a 20"
iMac that would run circles around even a maxed out G4.

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[think2much]

I experienced this same issue on a unit with over 200 gigs of free hard drive space, and over 2 gbs of RAM. I was attempting to cut and paste a fairly small (half a page) spreadsheet into a Word Document as a picture, and nothing would fix the issue. All versions of the Office are up-to-date, as is the Mac OS. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[John McGhie]

Yeah, there is a bug there, and you will have to work around it.

Copy what you want from Excel and paste it into a graphics application (e.g.
Preview).

Save as a PNG, then use Insert>Picture>From file ... To drop it into Word.

"Out of memory" is a spurious error message which simply means "I can't read
that". Word works down all its list of problem causes, and when it can't
figure out what is wrong, it guesses that it can't read what it wants from
memory because the thing it is trying to read is not IN the memory to be
read (which is true...) and that the most likely cause of that is that there
is no free memory.

Ten years ago, that could well have been true: these days, it's almost never
the case

Cheers

I experienced this same issue on a unit with over 200 gigs of free hard drive
space, and over 2 gbs of RAM. I was attempting to cut and paste a fairly small
(half a page) spreadsheet into a Word Document as a picture, and nothing would
fix the issue. All versions of the Office are up-to-date, as is the Mac OS.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi John;

I'm feeling particularly peckish this AM so I thought I'd engage your reply
with a simple query: In what context do you refer to this as a "bug"?

The OP is running Office X in 10.3.9 on a 640 MB G4 whereas the hijacker
provided no indication of his Office or OS versions. It's anyone's guess as
to why the latter is experiencing a similar symptom - somewhere between
Panther & Leopard with something between Office X & Office 2008 is a rather
broad spectrum. Perhaps if s/he would post a message of his own with the
pertinent details the issue could be resolved rather than worked around

There was a bug of this nature in earlier versions of 2008, but it has since
been addressed. Although I didn't have any doubt I just went into XL '09
copied 9 columns x 188 rows then used Edit> Paste Special - Picture in Word
with no error of any kind occurring in either program. Note that I
intentionally selected a range considerably larger than will fit on a letter
size page in order to create a situation more likely to force the error.

BTW: Another option [regardless of whether a workaround is needed or not] is
to select the range in XL then hold Shift while accessing the Edit menu to
choose the Copy Picture command, then just paste into Word

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Bob:

When I tested it, I also got an "Out of memory" message, so I thought the
bug was not fully resolved.

When I tested it again just now, it worked perfectly!

So you're right: 2008 to 2008 on Intel now works, and I do not know why I
got the problem yesterday. But given the cruel and unusual things I do to
my software while trying to replicate posters' problems, I would not be at
all surprised to find it was feeling a little "unwell".

If the hijacker is "not" using 2008 on Intel, then I have no idea -- perhaps
he's missing the update that fixed it

Cheers

Hi John;

I'm feeling particularly peckish this AM so I thought I'd engage your reply
with a simple query: In what context do you refer to this as a "bug"?

The OP is running Office X in 10.3.9 on a 640 MB G4 whereas the hijacker
provided no indication of his Office or OS versions. It's anyone's guess as
to why the latter is experiencing a similar symptom - somewhere between
Panther & Leopard with something between Office X & Office 2008 is a rather
broad spectrum. Perhaps if s/he would post a message of his own with the
pertinent details the issue could be resolved rather than worked around

There was a bug of this nature in earlier versions of 2008, but it has since
been addressed. Although I didn't have any doubt I just went into XL '09
copied 9 columns x 188 rows then used Edit> Paste Special - Picture in Word
with no error of any kind occurring in either program. Note that I
intentionally selected a range considerably larger than will fit on a letter
size page in order to create a situation more likely to force the error.

BTW: Another option [regardless of whether a workaround is needed or not] is
to select the range in XL then hold Shift while accessing the Edit menu to
choose the Copy Picture command, then just paste into Word

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

Yeah, there is a bug there, and you will have to work around it.

Copy what you want from Excel and paste it into a graphics application (e.g.
Preview).

Save as a PNG, then use Insert>Picture>From file ... To drop it into Word.

"Out of memory" is a spurious error message which simply means "I can't read
that". Word works down all its list of problem causes, and when it can't
figure out what is wrong, it guesses that it can't read what it wants from
memory because the thing it is trying to read is not IN the memory to be
read (which is true...) and that the most likely cause of that is that there
is no free memory.

Ten years ago, that could well have been true: these days, it's almost never
the case

Cheers

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]