Excel cannot complete the task with available resources. Choose less data or close applications.

Anonymous
2010-05-05T14:25:22+00:00

Excel cannot complete the task with available resources. Choose less data or close applications. the size of the file is 640MB with over 250k records. I have 3.25GB of memory. It takes 5 mintues for the file to open.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2011-09-07T15:07:34+00:00

I have been experiencing this problem for months (i.e., Excel cannot complete the task with available resources. Choose less data or close applications).  I am running Windows 7 and Office 2010.  The problem can occur with very small spreadsheets so it has nothing to do with the complexity of the spreadsheets.  After reading the other posts, especially the one from Chuthor, I began to suspect incompatibilities between Excel and other MS software that I've downloaded.

Anyway, I just uninstalled Windows Live Essentials and Microsoft Outlook Social Connector for Live Messenger, which came with an update from Microsoft on 4/7/2011.  This appears to have solved the problem.

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Anonymous
2012-04-09T18:19:33+00:00

We eventually opened a ticket with Microsoft. Apparently this is on their radar, with no real fix just this work around. The users were experiencing this error daily, and by disabling preview pane in the 3 necessar locations completly fixed the issue. Here is the workaround MS sent me.

Windows 7 is new with Preview/Details panes. These Preview/Details panes contribute to the "Available resources" issues, as well as our "Locked for Editing by another user" issues. We consider turning them off in these 3 locations as a valid test:

Windows:

1. Right click on Start Ribbon.

2. Click Open Windows Explorer.

3. Click Organize | Layout  |

4. Uncheck Details Pane and Preview Pane.

Excel:

1. Click File | Open.

2. Click Organize | Layout  |

3. Uncheck Details Pane and Preview Pane.

Outlook:

1. Open a new e-mail.

2. In the "Include" group, click Attach File.

3. Click Organize | Layout  |

4. Uncheck Details Pane and Preview Pane.

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  1. Anonymous
    2011-07-26T15:06:53+00:00

    I have this problem with just one user for quite some time.  I have never found an answer to this either.  I have to continue to dump all the files out of the XL Start or the user has to reboot the machine.  Very frustrating, it does not matter if there is just one spread sheet open or several.  I can open the same files on several other machines.  I have reloaded Office but I have not gone as far as reloading Windows.  These are very small Excel files and it never one in particular.  I will probably just reload Windows when this person is on vacation.

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  2. Anonymous
    2011-07-26T09:12:05+00:00

    I don't want to bump an old thread, but we are experiencing the same problem. We have one user who uses quite a lot of excel sheets (like 7-8 with no macro's, ...). Only on the pc she is using (Windows 7, Office 2010), we are experiencing the error "Excel cannot complete this task with available resources. Choose less data or close other applications." Followed by "Microsoft Excel cannot open or save any more documents because there is not enough available memory or disk space.".

    We have tried all the small tricks we found on the internet about this problem, but we didn't succeed yet. We don't have an Office Live Version (like Chuthor), so that can't be the problem. The person sitting next to her is on vacation this week, so she does the same work, but not successfully without error, on a pc with the same specifications at this moment.

    Is there yet a solution for this problem? Or how did you people posted before me eventually handle this problem?

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  3. Anonymous
    2011-06-23T01:59:41+00:00

    Strangely enough when I ran into this the thing that fixed it was removing Office Live Version 1.3, I'm not sure if you guys have that on your systems or not but it was what fixed mine doing this. Why I don't know, perhaps going to 1.4 would have fixed it too, but I was sick and tired of working on the issue and didn't want to touch it anymore after that.  I hope this helps someone else.

    Just a recap, I too was getting the error with opening attachments on a double click from outlook, it gave me the message about corrupt data and trying to recover it.

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