After you upgrade to Microsoft Office 2013/2016/Office 365, you experience one or more of the following symptoms:
The computer uses more memory when you open multiple Microsoft Excel 2013 workbooks, save Excel workbooks, or make calculations in Excel workbooks. You can no longer open as many Excel workbooks in the same instance as you could before you upgraded to Excel 2013/2016. When you insert columns in an Excel workbook, you receive an error about available memory.
The reason for this is that Excel has its own memory manager and memory limits, regardless of the memory capacity of your machine. In fact all the Excel versions after Excel 2003 were designed to use a maximum of 2GB memory.
How much memory does excel use?
The 32-bit version of Excel can use up to 2 GB of RAM or up to 4 GB of RAM for Large Address Aware 32-bit versions of Excel 2013 and 2016. However, the computer that is running Excel also requires memory resources.
The computer uses more memory when you open multiple Microsoft Excel 2013 workbooks, save Excel workbooks, or make calculations in Excel workbooks. You can no longer open as many Excel workbooks in the same instance as you could before you upgraded to Excel 2013/2016.
In fact all the Excel versions after Excel 2003 were designed to use a maximum of 2GB memory. So while your computer may have 4GB or even 8GB RAM, Excel can only use 2GB of that. If it reaches this limit you get the error messages.
How can I increase the amount of memory available for Excel?
There isn’t enough memory to complete this action. Try using less data or closing other applications. To increase memory availability, consider: – Using a 64-bit version of Microsoft Excel. – Adding memory to your device.
Moreover, how to improve Excel memory and file performance?
This means that input values should be to the left and above the formulas which are referencing them. Avoid creating formulae referencing the entire columns or rows. Some Excel users create a formula using $D or $AA to reference the entire column to simplify the calculations.
Does 64 bit Excel use all the memory on the machine?
64 bit Excel will use all the memory on the machine if it needs to. It’s always important to avoid hitting memory limits, because when that happens, Windows will start paging memory in and out, and performance will become so terrible that the machine will effectively be unusable, and the computer can take hours to return to a workable state.
While I was reading we ran into the question “Can excel run on 2 GB of RAM?”.
Therefore, if you only have 2 GB of RAM on your computer, Excel cannot take advantage of the full 2 GB because a portion of the memory is allocated to the operating system and other programs that are running. To optimize the performance of Excel on a 32-bit computer, we recommend that the computer have at least 3 GB of RAM.