Excel alert not enough memory

Question

I've recently encountered a strange issue with Excel for Mac from Microsoft's 2016 package. On certain spreadsheets it displays an message saying:

'Alert Not Enough Memory.' As per the screenshot below.

There is plenty of space on the hard drive and plenty of available RAM. I tried running it in Safe mode, repaired disk permissions and tried converting the document to .xlsx all with no joy. 

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

I suddenly started having this exact same problem on a MacBook Pro with a lot of free RAM and hard disk space. I found the cause of the problem was that I had changed the colour of the gridlines in my workbook (Excel>Preferences>View>Gridlines), when I set it back to automatic the problem disappeared. This was reproducible on every workbook I tried, change the colour of gridlines, out of memory alert pops up when trying to save, set it back to automatic, no alert. Obviously a bug, this was with Excel 15.20 on OS X 10.11.4., MacBook Pro 8GB RAM, 240GB SSD (200GB free).

Answer 2

I have this issue as well, but only on one (large) excel file. It works fine on excel 2011 (where it was created); it would be good to know how to debug that.

Answer 3

I'm having this issues as well, but without a solution.  My files are NOT big - less than 100 lines.  I also have more than enough memory, so I haven't got a clue why it keeps throwing this error, but it's making me crazy!

Answer 4

Count me in too! I'm having the problem with 60+gb space available on a 16gb machine that's not using much memory.

Answer 5

I am having the same issues. Is anyone offering a solution?

I called Microsoft and got the traditional heavy call volume saying the wait would be 30 minutes. After 2 1/2 hours on hold I finally gave up.