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

Excel displays that error message instead of a message that actually explains what went wrong.

Let's start by figuring out what update version of Excel you are using on which operating system. Please go to the Excel menu and choose About Excel. Find the version number and put that into a reply to this message. Then go to the Apple Menu and choose about About this Mac. Find the version number of Mac OS X and reply with that information, as well.

At what point are you seeing this message? When you open the workbook? When you do something specific in the workbook? What is the source of the workbook? Do you know of anything unusual about the problem workbook?

When did this problem first start occurring (after you installed an update, perhaps)/

Answer 3

I get this message when I try to save some Excel workbooks, and not particularly large ones.

Excel version: 15.19.1

OSX version: 10.11.3

Macbook Air, 2015, 20 gigs free, no other programs running

It doesn't happen with every spreadsheet, but it doesn't happen consistently enough for me to report on the type of file, source, etc. 

Excel does in fact seem to be saving the file, but consistently (at least with this one file, which is a 1-page expense reclaim sheet I've used for years with other versions of Excel), I get this 'alert, out of memory' error.

Answer 4

As i said earlier, this particular error message is rather generic. 

Please check to make sure that there are no special characters (for example, /\*#@!+ - anything that isn't a letter or number) in the name of your hard drive, startup volume, in any containing folder, in the name of the workbook or the name of any sheet tab.

Answer 5

Hi,

Nope, no special characters, and as previously mentioned, I've used this same spreadsheet for many years without the alert. The original spreadsheet is in xls format (and was originally created in 2001 according to the File Properties), but I still get the alert when saving to xlsx format. 

I have just copied the content to a new xlsx spreadsheet, in case there were any gremlins lurking. So far, I have not gotten the 'alert'. I did notice that one line in the spreadsheet appeared to have a very large set of merged cells (that is, when I highlighted it the shaded area extended way out to the right), so perhaps the gremlin is there.