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

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

60 GB? If that is all the empty space you have left on your hard drive that is not near enough. You need to Put in a Large hard Drive.  Especially if you have upgraded to Sierra. I have upgraded and my machine is "huffing and puffing" just living within 8 GB Ram and 180 GB empty space. El Capitan is a Speed demon compared to Sierra.

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Answer 3

I also experienced the same problem after changing the color of the gridlines; I did what Ant_P suggested and the problem has not shown up again. This is not a bug but an inconvenient feature." I have plenty of RAM and Hard disk free space.

Answer 4

I just tested in 15.28 Fast Insider build and the problem still exhibits.

I will click the Smile button in Excel and report the problem, as should anyone else who comes across the gridline color issue.

Answer 5

I have -

MacBook (Retina, 12-inch, Early 2015)

OS 10.12  (16A323)

1.2 GHz Intel Core M

8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

Intel HD Graphics 5300 1536 MB

300 of 500 GB SSD

Office 365 15.26 (160910)

new HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M277

Here are my Excel woes:

1. I upgraded from El C to Sierra a week ago.
2. All was well until a couple of days ago when Excel slowed down. I had to wait several seconds to move the highlight from one cell to another, and longer for more complicated operations to execute.
3. Yesterday I tried to make the grid lines gray instead of the default black, because I had noticed that when printed the grid lines were very thick and heavy and I could find no setting to at least get them thin.
4. The setting to gray resulted in getting the infamous message about not enough memory.
5. Last night I downloaded and installed Sierra again, and I auto-check updates for Office weekly so I am sure that I am up to date.
6. Today when I opened the spreadsheet, before I did anything I got the  not enough memory message, followed by not enough display memory.

Yuk!!