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

You don't have the latest update installed. Try installing the update.

Make sure your Mac has a working internet connection before checking for updates. Install Mac OS X updates followed by Office updates.

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Mac OS X updates:

To get Mac OS updates, go to the App store on your dock, and then click the Updates button to reveal available updates.

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Office Updates

To get the update:

1. Open any Office application:
2. Make sure your Mac has a working internet connection
3. Go to the Help menu and choose Check for Updates
4. Let AutoUpdate check for and install updates
5. Restart your Mac

Answer 3

I'm using Excel for Mac 2011, v 14.6.6 (160626)

OSX 10.11.5

32GB RAM. I have just under 8GB of that dedicated to Parallels, and I rarely get beyond 20 GB used overall. I do see kernel task as the biggest hog, routinely at 1.5 GB. Have started in safe mode, repaired permissions (via Terminal), deleted plists, you name it.

I've hesitated to go to Office 2016 because every time I "upgrade" to the latest version of office, it seems like I just trade some problems for some different ones. More troubling relative to available options was that Trend Micro (company security choice) doesn't seem to play nice with Office 365, so I'm back to Office 2011. If 2016 TRULY works well with El Capitan, tell me and I'll give it a shot.

I'm experiencing the problem largely while working with Tables. Interesting that most tables have some funky formatting and/or color schemes, relative to the prior comment about colored gridlines. Maybe that's throwing it off. Excel simply cannot convert a table back to a range. Once a table, always a table. Try to convert a table back to a range and here comes the spinning ball and a Force Quit.

Question for all: does any of this disappear with Office 2016? (Which, by the way, even 2011 activates the Office 365 service as seen in the Activity Monitor) Since Trend doesn't like 365, do I have any options?

thanks in advance

Answer 4

Well I went ahead and purchased Excel for Mac 2016 and it appears that the problem is now resolved.

Answer 5

Thanks - you have found the solution to my problem - I had changed the grid lines colour!