Not Enough Memory

  • Thread starter Thread starter sstexas
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sstexas

I'm having trouble with a spreadsheet that has 32,000 rows and 120 columns
(Excel takes forever to do anything, I get frequent "low memory" warnings,
etc). I'm currently using Excel 2003. I cannot break this spreadsheet into
pieces - it has to be combined in one sheet.

Is there a way to get around this problem? Should I upgrade to Excel 2007?
Can I purchase special software?

I've looked online, and it doesn't appear as though there's a fix for this,
but I figured you guys might have an answer.
 
A couple things come to mind.........

1- How much RAM do you have?
2- Are there numerous formulas that could be converted to just the values?

Vaya con Dios,
Chuck, CABGx3
 
Excel 2007 will not solve your problems, it hogs more memory than
2003. Does this occur with just one spreadsheet, or with other
spreadsheets and programs besides Excel?

Instead of purchasing software, see if you have too much software
running. Open Task Manager, go to Processes, in Columns select Page
File Usage. Sort by that column, and see what's using up the page
file. Likewise, look at what's eating up the memory. Many times it's
resident programs, some of which may not even show up on your
taskbar. Consider clearing up your system a little bit and see
whether that makes a difference.
 
Purely as a guess your problem is that you are using XL as a database which
it is not intended to do. A true database such as Access might be a better
choice. Here is a link to memory limits in XL and also some info on
calculation. What you are doing will cause huge issues in both areas and
there is no easy fix if you stay in XL...

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

PS upgrading to 2007 might help a bit but it will not get around the
fundamental problem that XL was never intended as a database...
 
Built a Vista 64bit Ultimate with 512MB DDR2 to get it up and
running. Everything ran hot, the processor flat out, swapping
stuff to and from the HD cache, massive page faulting, no
heatsinks on the memory so that was probably running hot,
PSU running hot, as was HD with the pagefile being continously
accessed.
Large Office2007 Excel spreadsheet macros ran like a dog, even
with a 3.08GHz processor.
Swapped in 4GB Crucial 555 DDR2 no more page faults to
speak of, macros much faster. Check the file size of your
saved Excel file, and relate that to the amount of RAM you have.
If you need greater performance then there a mobos. that
support more than 4GB RAM, and have memory mapping
so that you can use 8GB or more of RAM.
Apart from that we have to wait until MS get round to
a 64bit version of Office, which I'm surprised they didn't
offer for XP 64bit, prior to Vista launch.
I'm about to ditch Vista as posts seem to suggest that
XP 64bit is much faster than Vista 64bit, and not such a
pain in the butt as Vista.
 
It sounds to me like Excel is making frequent use of virtual memory.
If stopping unneeded software from running at the same time as Excel
doesn't solve the problem (see iliace's post), more RAM is probably
the best idea.

I upgraded RAM on a friend's WinXP machine from 256 MB to 768 MB. It
was abominably slow before the change; my friend is still amazed at
the speed at which his PC works, six months afterward. My own XP
machine was upgraded to 1 GB from 512 MB and it's much snappier now.

Mark Lincoln
 
XL maintains it's own pool of ram so buying more ram will probably not help.
Taken directly from the site I posted...

Excel uses its own pools of memory (Excel useable memory) for this workbook
data. Unfortunately these memory pools are not in general as large as the
Windows memory, and may well be a lot less than the RAM on your PC. Excel 95,
Excel 97 and Excel 2000 have a limit for workbook formula memory of about 80
MB, and Excel 2002 has a limit of about 160MB. Excel 2003 has a limit of 1 GB
and Excel 2007 has a limit which is controlled by Windows, allowing 2 GB,
although differences between Excel 2003 and 2007 mean that you may not be
able to use larger workbooks with 2007 than with 2003.

Additionally based on the number of cells he has with data as a guess he has
blown through the dependency tree meaning that all of his formulas will now
be volatile... In short XL is not meant for this kind of thing... You can
throw all of the hardware at it you want and it will still perform poorly.
 
A lot would depend on just how much RAM there is in the system and how
many other programs are running. Excel 2003 may have a limit of 1
gig, but there may be very little memory actually available to it,
resulting in many trips to virtual memory. In such a case (as in the
first example I gave), more RAM may well help.

I do agree fully with your other points. There's a lot of stuff there
for Excel to try to deal with. And I'm wondering if the "low memory"
messages are from Excel. If so, you're most likely correct and RAM is
not the issue.

Mark Lincoln
 
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