Odd "not enough memory" behaviour

[PhilD]

All,

(I've looked though the archive and not found anything quite like
this).

I have a large spreadsheet that contains what is essentially a
catalogue of music that I own. I'm putting certain of this information
into iTunes.

I filter the spreadsheet by album name (for example), and then
copy/paste individual cells (track name) into iTunes. This, I hope,
should be straightforward.

However, I find that, after filtering, I get a "not enough memory"
error when doing command-C to copy a single cell. I click OK, then the
message reappears straight away, I click OK again, then everything runs
as normal and as expected. This only occurs for the first copy after
filtering, and the message always appears twice.

On filtering again for other data, the process restarts on some
occasions, but not others.

Now, as I said, after OK-ing the error message everything works fine,
so it's not that much of a bother, but why does this happen? If there
really isn't enough memory, why does Excel work fine anyway? It's
almost like

Excel: "I'm not working"
Me: "Oh, pleeeeeease"
Excel: "Alright then"

Any thoughts?

Office 2004 (all updates), OS 10.4.4 (though also happened in 10.4.3,
don't know about 10.4.2)

PhilD

 

[LRL]

I have seen this but unlike you once it gets in this "out of memory"
condition, it's permanent. Usually, I get it when I'm doing VBA work and I go
to save my changes. Then it says out of memory and we go around the barn a
few times and I end up saving my changes in a text editor and reimporting the
changes when I relaunch Excel.

This has happened with Office X and Office 2004 on 10.4.3. I've only just
upgraded to 10.4.4 but haven't seen it yet. But then I've taken to saving my
changes every few minutes. I've sometimes suspected it has something to do
with how long Excel is left open. I'll leave my work open overnight so that I
can pick up where I left off the next morning.

I find it interesting (and enviable) that you can get out of it. My
suspicion was that Excel has some internal pool that's some hang over from
pre-VM days and that once it's exhausted, well, that's it. But if you're able
to get out of it, (I'll try the pretty-please method next time instead of
the you-freaking-piece-of-crap method ;-), then that doesn't seem likely any
more. Since you're trying to do a copy, then it might be some clipboard issue.

I know this is not helpful but maybe somebody has a fix that will help my
more permanent out of memory condition.