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
    2011-04-11T15:12:21+00:00

    I've been able to reproduce it consistently if I open an excel spreadsheet that is an email attachment when I already have excel open, with a spreadsheet.

    I do not have these files in the folders indicated - it does not show in a windows search (but the new version no longer gives you an easy way to search the whole hard drive, so I might have missed them if they are in some other system folder.  OFFICE 12 has nothing starting with XLSTART, Office 14 has an empty directory.

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  2. Anonymous
    2011-04-09T14:58:36+00:00

    I downloaded office suite 2010 through the university at which I am employed. How do I go about doing a reinstall? (I do not not have a disk)  Like djking above, I am using windows 7 and very, very light activity in Excel, but after opening maybe six or eight worksheets, I get the "unable to complete" message. As dj says, it is extremely frustrating. I seem to have plenty of available resources, few if any other programs running, and have stripped my startup items down to the bare minimum. Help!

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  3. Anonymous
    2011-03-18T12:04:50+00:00

    Stream.. ringing in...

    It appears as a MS update problem. Its either Windows vista/Xp /win 7 update problem or a Excel 2010 64/32 bit update problem.

    I have same problem with excel 2007 on the same machine. Both machines in the past 4 months open a great amount of large excel wooksheets. One machine has 12GB ram i7 and  on the quad extreme 8 GB of ram. Both running 64 bit windows vista. The automatic updates are turned on both machines. I loaded 30 large interactive wooksheet in october 2010 now I can only load 7 only. What did help me was turning off virtual ram - that uses the hard disk. Contorl panel, device manager, performance -choose (no) virtual memory.

    The solution is clean reinstall of windows and MSoffice from DVD disk. Very important turn off automatic updates, and don't load any service packs. Try loading all of the large workbooks again. From here it should be plain sailing. If you have time you can try and retrace or troubleshoot win/msoffice updates. Slowly testing after each patch is install.

    I am just wiping windows out and reinstalling a clean  64bit vista and loading a fresh msexcel 64 bit with no updates whats so ever. I am very sure this will work and rectify all of your situation.

    Debugging is for programmers and this is there speciality. If you want to make it yours then you are going to spend some time narrowing down to a final file or solution.

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