How To Fix Not Enough Memory Issue
Excel cannot complete this task with available resources. Choose less data or close other applications.
Out of Memory
Not enough System Resources to Display Completely
There isn’t enough memory to complete this action. Try using less data or closing other applications. To increase memory availability, consider:
- Using a 64-bit version of Microsoft Excel.
- Adding memory to your device.
There can be numerous reasons for such issues and we will try to understand how can we resolve when we are facing such issues:
Let us check if any of the Excel sheets has some extra formatting which is not required. Sometimes when we format data we format the entire sheet and the size of the file increases unnecessarily.
Unnecessary formulas:
sometimes we have files with formulas copied over to entire sheet and we can remove the extra part to make it work.
Contents of the spreadsheet. The first thing to determine is if the error is specific to one workbook (or others created from the same template). Typical actions that cause memory error messages are:
- Inserting a row or column
- Sorting
- Performing calculations
- Copy and pasting
- Opening or closing the workbook
- Running VBA
Extra Add-ins:
sometimes we are using a lot of add ins which we installed and we never used which could cause some troubles.
Hidden tabs/Formatting:
Sometimes we have a lot of hidden tabs which are not required and we can remove the same to make it work.
The last process we can do to find which sheet is taking up all the space is by hit and trial: Start deleting the sheets one by one , please create a copy of the workbook before doing that. After every deletion check the file size if it decreases drastically by any single sheet we can recreate that sheet from scratch.
Convert the sheet to binary:
We can save the file as a binary file in the .xlsb format and this works sometimes.
Template
Further reading: Basic concepts Getting started with Excel Cell References
