HELP: Not Enough System Resources to Display Completely (and upgrading to 2003)

[Tristán White]

My boss has this massive Excel spreadsheet with a number of worksheets
linked with other spreadsheets etc.

He is using Excel 2000 on Office 2000.

His computer was crashing with the above whenever he tried to do work
on it. We bought him a brand new computer, 1 gig of RAM, 80 GB of HDD.
We're a small company - a charity - so this was as powerful as we
could afford.

This was a week ago and it's happening again.

We desperately need to get this spreadsheet working, and he cannot
simplify it (or rather, that would take too long). I have changed the
Virtual Memory settings of the PC and it made no difference.

Having done some googling around it seems that this is because Excel
2000 crashes with large or complex spreadsheets - According to
Knowledge Base report http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=313275

In versions of Excel earlier than Microsoft Excel 2002,
the memory limit is 64 MB. In Excel 2002, the limit is
increased to 128 MB. In Microsoft Office Excel 2003,
the limit is increased to 1gigabyte (GB).
Because this is a per-instance limit, this problem may
occur if you have two or three large workbooks open, or
one very large workbook. If you are working with several
workbooks, try to open them in separate instances of Excel.

We've tried everything they suggest apart from upgrading to Excel
2003.

What we need to know now, before we go to the expense of upgrading,
is:

WILL THIS 100% SOLVE THE ISSUE?????

Thanks!! Microsoft seem to suggest it will, but "upgrade your
software" is pretty much their solution to everything (for example, I
still use XP service pack 1, and whenever I have a small computer
problem and ask the computer to find out why, it always says that
upgrading to SP2 will solve the problem, which is rubbish as one of
the computers across the room has SP2 and crashes with the same
document!)

So will upgrading to Excel 2003 solve this issue? Have users of Excel
2003 still had the "Not enough system resources" message come up.

Truthfully please!!

ALSO, would we have to upgrade all 28 staff with Excel 2003, or will
my boss still be able to send Excel 2003 spreadsheets to the rest of
the staff and they'll be alble to open it??? Obviously the staff would
not be able to open the dodgy document - the one that crashes - but
they won't need to - this is just my boss's document. But he often
sends finance reports etc to "All Staff" - would they be able to open
them, or would there be macros etc preventing earlier versions of
Excel from opening 2003 spreadsheets, without my Boss having to "save
as 2000"???

Thanks!

TRISTÁN WHITE

 

[Guest]

Dear Tristan,

I don't think upgrading will solve your problem. I'm facing the same problem
with some linked spreadsheets. In the office we work with Excel 2002. I've
tried it at home where I have Excel 2003 and a pc with 1024 Mb memory. I
still get the same error.
I also found the article in the knowledge base and if you read it carefully
you will see that not only the amount of memory that Excel can handle is
limited, but also the number of source cells is limited to 32760. As far as I
can tell (and I am absolutely no pro) is this our problem. You can read that
Microsoft fixed the amount of memory problem but the article does not mention
any increase of the number of source cells that Excel can handle.
For us it's also very important to get the sheets working asap, but I still
don't know how.

I wish you succes

Ruud

"Tristán White" schreef:

 

[Tristán White]

Dear Tristan,

I don't think upgrading will solve your problem. I'm facing the same problem
with some linked spreadsheets. In the office we work with Excel 2002. I've
tried it at home where I have Excel 2003 and a pc with 1024 Mb memory. I
still get the same error.
I also found the article in the knowledge base and if you read it carefully
you will see that not only the amount of memory that Excel can handle is
limited, but also the number of source cells is limited to 32760. As far as I
can tell (and I am absolutely no pro) is this our problem. You can read that
Microsoft fixed the amount of memory problem but the article does not mention
any increase of the number of source cells that Excel can handle.
For us it's also very important to get the sheets working asap, but I still
don't know how.

I wish you succes

Ruud

Thank you.... that's scary news. We're crossing our fingers and
praying that the upgrade will solve the problem. But I guess it's
better to be forewarned!!

If it still goes wrong, then what! ouch!!

 

[Tristán White]

Ruud, since this group is not the busiest, I 've sent the problem to
microsoft.public.excel and included yours as well, hopefully we'll
both get answers. I've also asked whether the upgrade increases the
source cells needed, and also whether there's another way.

 

[Tristán White]

I don't think upgrading will solve your problem. I'm facing the same problem
with some linked spreadsheets. In the office we work with Excel 2002. I've

<SNIP>


So far so good. Upgraded to Office 2003, Excel 2003 and the document
opens and doesn't crash. Fingers crossed!