

While it was fine with older Excel versions the new versions have over a million rows per column – so entire row or column references causes Excel to calculate the formula a million times, and work much harder than it needs to. Some Excel users create a formula using $D or $AA to reference the entire column to simplify the calculations.

This means that input values should be to the left and above the formulas which are referencing them. Excel starts calculating from the top left-hand corner, then continues across and down the sheet. A better planned design ensures you can avoid such changes. Depending on the number of impacted formulae and their complexity you could run out of memory. If you insert a new column in the spreadsheet, it forces Excel to recalculate all of the formulae affected by that insertion. Plan your Excel solution designs properly.When you are building a model in Excel, there are a few ways of working which are not only good practice, they will also reduce the chances of encountering memory problems in your model. Check this article for some tips on reducing file size and here are some more tips to reduce the working memory used by your Excel file.
#Excel not enough memory to delete rows how to
Now that you know why you have these limitations, we’ll see how to minimise their occurrence. Hence, 64-bit Excel versions can use the entire system memory giving you much better performance, but read this article about the 64-bit version of Excel before you jump straight in and upgrade. So upgrading your computer’s memory probably won’t help! The 64-bit version of Excel has boosted this memory limit exponentially.

If it reaches this limit you get the error messages. So while your computer may have 4GB or even 8GB RAM, Excel can only use 2GB of that. In fact all the Excel versions after Excel 2003 were designed to use a maximum of 2GB memory. The reason for this is that Excel has its own memory manager and memory limits, regardless of the memory capacity of your machine. If you have a RAM of more than 4GB you’ll know that your computer has ample memory – although Excel is complaining about none being available. If you get a memory error message, check the task manager for memory utilisation. Typically you might consider upgrading your RAM or switching from a laptop to a desktop to counteract these problems, but these are unlikely to help as it’s quite possibly the way that Excel is being used which is holding you back – not your machine. When you get this frustrating message, the only solution is to close Excel and restart it, so let’s look at some ways to improve the performance of your Excel models. Often it’s the memory being used and when things get really bad, you might even get a “Not enough Memory” or “Not enough system resources to display completely” error message. The int() function then could be used to make sure all ages are in integer format.If you have sluggish Excel models, it might not just be the file size that is slowing things down. For example, there could be a dataset where the age was entered as a floating point number (by mistake). Sometimes, it might be possible to work around them. These are values which do not make sense (like the byte order mark we saw earlier).

This file is good, in that it is otherwise clean - but many files have missing data, data in internal inconsistent format, etc. They might contain extra symbols like this that can throw your scripts off. You cannot assume the files you read are clean. What’s with the extra \xef\xbb\xbf at the beginning? Well, the \x actually means that the value is hexadecimal, which is a Byte Order Mark, indicating that the text is Unicode.
