Error message grinds me to a halt

[Guest]

Hi, I believe that I have a similar with Excel 2002 (part of the MSOffice
2002 Suite program) and wonder if this is a flaw in Excel? I have a
spreadsheet to track my stock portfolio that links to another spreadsheet
with current stock prices. I would guess that there are about 30-40 links
which weer set up using the Special Paste function of Excel. The problem
that I have is when I try and Save and / or Close the spreadsheet, Excel
CRASHES and I get an error message advising "Excel cannot
complete this task with available resources. Choose less data or close other
applications. This error message does not appear all the time, I would
guess maybe 75% of the time that try to either Save or Exit Excel this
spreadsheet and it has NOT occuured with any of my other spreadsheets except
for this one (with the
links). I understand that error message is advising me of a resource problem
but I
have 1G RAM and the Hard Drive that Excel is installed, is 80% Free, I also
cleaned and defraged all my of the Hard Drives so I am not quite sure WHAT is
going on so I wonder if I may be excountering the same error and there is a
problem with Excel?
Thanks,
Bob

 

[Nick Hodge]

Bob

Excel can only use a certain pool of your system memory so it doesn't
matter, (in your version certainly) if you have 4gb it would still give the
same error.

You can check memory limits here

http://www.decisionmodels.com/memlimitsc.htm

--
HTH
Nick Hodge
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Southampton, England
(e-mail address removed)
www.nickhodge.co.uk

FREE UK OFFICE USER GROUP MEETING, MS READING, 27th APRIL 2007
www.officeusergroup.co.uk

 

[Guest]

Nick:

On behalf of myself and others similarly situated, thanks for the info. I'd
been to the referenced XL pages once before but didn't get as many references
as on this visit. Appreciate the input.

jl

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your reply Nick, I was unaware of the Excel memory limitations
and appreciate you advising me accordingly. Unfortunately that eliminates
one of the possibliities I thought might be the cause of the probledm that I
am experiencing. Any thoughts on what might be causing my Excel spreadsheet
to crash? Thanks again, Bob

 

[Nick Hodge]

Bob

Sometimes Excel workbooks just get full of hidden clutter that causes it to
become unstable. You could try round-tripping it to HTML and back by saving
as HTML format, closing and re-opening in Excel and then saving as an .xls
(Do this with a copy). This round-tripping sometimes removes the clutter,
else a re-build may be necessary. Not knowing the structure of your workbook
it's also difficult to know what formulas the links are using and how
'efficient' your structure is

--
HTH
Nick Hodge
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Southampton, England
(e-mail address removed)
web: www.nickhodge.co.uk
blog: www.nickhodge.co.uk/blog/

FREE UK OFFICE USER GROUP MEETING, MS READING, 27th APRIL 2007
www.officeusergroup.co.uk

 

[Guest]

We are also experiencing the same error message, but I think a slightly
different problem. We're in a corporate environment with Excel 2003 and
we're creating PivotTables from a SQL database that houses our time worked.
The number of records isn't large enough to exceed Excels max, memory doesn't
seem to be a problem, and the problem exists on newly created files as well
as old files, so corruption shouldn't come in to play.

The data displays. and all of the pivottable functionality works, save one
drop down where the user can limit or expand the time frame covered by the
data. When attempting to access the dropdown, the error message "Excel
cannot complete this task with available resources. Choose less data or
close other applications". We've tried limiting the data coming back from
the query to relatively short periods of time (and a smaller dataset) wth no
change.

We've tried this on several different computers, including a Citrix server
with 4 Gbs of RAM and dual daul-core 2GHz processors. The machine originally
exhibiting the problem has 2Gbs of RAM, a dual-core 2GHz CPU and reports that
a pivottable exhibiting the error is only using 2.3Mbs of memory, while Task
Manager reports Excel is using 30.79Mb total.

The older reports which now have the problem worked in the past, and the
problem is present on new PivotTables as well.

I've exhausted my resources in dealing with this. Any help is appreciated.