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

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!

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.

Hi everybody - a lot to address here!  :)

First - the memory background.  Excel has a memory limitation of 2GB.  This is not Microsoft or Office only, but all 32-bit applications made by anyone.  So having a 4GB, 8GB, 20GB, however big machine doesn't really matter.  32-bit Excel can only use 2GB of it.  However, starting with Office 2010, you can now get these applications in 64-bit which alllows Excel to use all of the memory available on the machine.  Most users won't need that much memory, but if you're consistently running into the above error it would be something to look at.  (P.S.  Processor speed isn't part of the equation.)

Second - the error message.  Excel is throwing the message, but it may or may not be Excel using all the memory.  As the message states, closing other applications is a possible solution.  Another resolution may be to not referencing entire columns in formulas or defined names (a best practice is to NEVER reference entire columns, especially in the larger grid introduced in 2007).

Third - the resolution.  If it were me constantly or randomly getting the error, I'd take a look at the memory allocation when it happens.  You could try Task Manager, but it only shows the memory being used, Excel (and other apps) "reserve" memory as well.  This is not shown in Task Manager, but can be seen using a different tool called Process Explorer.  It's a free download from Microsoft, and can be found here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653

Hope this helps!

Dear Ryan,

Thanks for the above information. As you say that Excel only uses 2 GB memory, so is it applicable for all versions of excel or merely XL2003? Also, how much RAM is required to run XL 2003+ versions?