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

20 GB's Free?

Is that amount of Hard Drive space? (which is a little low)

Or is that System RAM (in which case I didn't know any Mac computer can address more than 16GB

Every one!

What we need to know

1. Version of Excel 2016? (latest is Version 15.20)
2. Hard Drive total size? ( 256 GB, 512 GB , 1 GB)
3. Amount of empty space on Hard Drive? (100 GB, 200 GB)
4. Finally the current System Version? (OSX.9.5, OSX.10.6, OSX.11.4)

Office 2016 uses Vastly more Code than 2011 and therefore takes much more scratch disk space to work.

Also 2016 current version is tuned to use OSX.11.x (EL Capitan).

Doing the above will help MVP's such as Jim  and Perhaps other such as Bob Jones, John McGhie, and other that may venture a suggestion to figure out something to try.

_________

Disclaimer:

The questions, discussions, opinions, replies & answers I create, are solely mine and mine alone, and do not reflect upon my position as a Community Moderator.

Answer 3

I have working on a large spreadsheet for a few months now and one day I received a message of a corrupt file and excel shutdown. Every since then I have been having trouble with the error message-not enough memory. After I read this post I noticed some of my sheet names had a % sign. Once I renamed the sheets, the error messages stopped.

Answer 4

This worked for me.  Can Microsoft please fix this bug?  Changing the color of the gridlines is very important to me and now I cannot do it.

Answer 5

Hello!

I have exactly the same problem of "Not enough memory". I didnt have this kind of issue/alert when I installed Office 365 and started using Excel sometime mid February this year.

Aside from the "Not enough memory" alert, I now am getting this new alert: "Not enough memory to display completely." 

I'v done the suggestion in this thread to remove from the file and sheet names other characters that are not alpha-numeric, but to no avail.

What you need to know about my iMac and Excel versions:

1. Version of Excel 2016? (Version 15.21.1)
2. Hard Drive total size? (998.98 GB)
3. Amount of empty space on Hard Drive? (947.58 GB)
4. Finally the current System Version? (OSX El Capitan 10.11.5)

I havent had this kind of annoying issues with Microsoft. Perhaps it is just the 365 that is doing this, amongst other issues i'v read in its reviews.

Anyways, I hope a solution comes up soon enough before I run out of hair!