"Excel cannot complete this task with available resources."

[Guest]

I receive the following message:
"Excel cannot complete this task with the available resources. Choose less
data or close other applications."
I am currently using Microsoft Excel 2003 SP2. This error message occurs
when I tried to do a 'Print Preview' or 'Save' or 'Open New File' or 'Print'.
I have not had problems completing any other tasks so far. When this error
message pops up, I have to click OK a few times with the same message popping
up. After this, sometimes Excel cannot even return to functioning properly,
sometimes the lettering becomes extremely large and only a few lines are
visible on the entire screen, and only one or two times I return to Excel and
continue where I left off however it does not sucessfully complete the task I
asked it to.

The files sizes I'm dealing with are extremely small for any type of Excel
spreadsheet which is why I don't understand what is going on and how to fix
it. File sizes range from 152 KB - 3,415 KB. Any help is greatly
appreciated and thanks in advance.

 

[Ronald Dodge]

Are you possibly copying and pasting a large amount of data a few times or
are some of these files using either the SUMIF and/or COUNTIF functions?

What is the amount of RAM and extended memory (aka SWAP file or virtual
memory) on your system?

I'm just asking this as I have ran into this sort of issue, though normally
with files somewhat larger and primarily ran though VBA as I wouldn't want
to perform the steps manually.

Excel has an undo level of 16 by default, which can be changed via a
registry hack such as in my case, I have had to do that to address this very
issue that I had faced as the program would copy and paste a fairly large
amount of data from one place to another. The program would work fine for
the first 2 or 3 files, but come the next file, it would error out without
having this undo registry hack in place with the value set at "4" meaning
that Excel will now only undo up to 4 levels (or previous steps taken)
rather than the 16 that Excel was setup to do by default.

I have also ran into this sort of issue when using a larger number of
SUMIF/COUNTIF functions over a larger amount of data as these functions are
very expensive in both CPU and memory usage.

CPU needed to perform these functions is equal to:

Amount of time it takes to process just on one record multiplied by the
number of records in the data set multiplied by the number of different
cells with this function.

For the amount of memory is needed, I'm not really sure what that value is,
but when it comes to calculations causing the program to crash, more often
than not, it's been from the use of the SUMIF function. The more of these
that I use and over the larger number of records of data that the SUMIF
function is used against, the more likely it has been for the program to
crash due to memory intensive issues.

I wouldn't think your issue would be caused by the SUMIF as likely, but the
copying and pasting of larger amounts of data could possibly do it,
especially if the undo level is at the 16 by default.

--

Sincerely,

Ronald R. Dodge, Jr.
Master MOUS 2000

 

[Guest]

Thank you for your quick reply. I have no formulas or anything like that in
the document. I am simply copying and pasting business names, phone numbers
and addresses from yellowpages.com into Excel so I can fit more information
on one page and save paper. Maybe it is the link that copies with the
business name from the website??? Each business name is underlines and in
blue so if I click on the name in Excel it will take me to that companies map
showing me the location. That is the only thing I can think of.