Microsoft Excel cannot open or save any more documents because there is not enough available memory or disk space.

Anonymous
2013-01-14T20:16:02+00:00

Hello,

I am running Office Pro Plus 2013.

I try to open a 35KB xlsx and I get this message:

"Microsoft Excel cannot open or save any more documents because there is not enough available memory or disk space.

. To make more memory available, close workbooks or programs you no longer need.

. To free disk space, delete files you no longer need from the disk you are saving to."

I have 200GB free on drive C and 16GB RAM with only 18% in use according to task manager. My Users folder is actually on D: (it's a hard shorctut) and this has 800GB free.

Excel is opening all other things fine and all other office apps work fine (as does everything else) it's just this one small xlsx that is causing me problems.

Googling comes up with lots of results and all seem to either boil down to user error (insufficient disk space) or an incorrect path. A egistry hack, which I've tried, sets the Cache folder to point to c:\Windows\Temp. This makes no difference (but everything else still works)

The spreadsheet in question has been downloaded from Google docs. I've tried a few times to download and always get the same. I've also tried the ods format and I get the same results in Excel. Downloading as PDF, or CSV is fine.

Any ideas?

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2013-01-15T10:20:44+00:00

Hi,

Thank you for posting in Microsoft Community. As I understand, you are unable to open a particular Excel file which is downloaded from the Google docs.

Since the issue occurs with a particular file, it might be file specific issue.

Just a quick question:

What is the format of the File?

Save the file locally on the system and then try to open the file and check if it opens fine.

Right click on the saved file, click on Properties and uncheck the option Block and then try to open the file and check.

If you are still unable to open the file in Excel then open the file in CSV format, save the file as Excel file (.xlsx) and then try to open the file and check.

I hope the above suggestions helps to resolve your issue. If you need any further assistance reply and we will be glad to assist you.

Thank you.

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  1. Anonymous
    2014-03-25T15:23:29+00:00

    Hi Evan,

    I just ran into this same problem with Windows 8.1 x64 and Office 2013 x86. I was able to resolve it by adding the fully qualified share name to Trusted Locations in each of the Office products. 

    Click on File, then Options. From the Options menu click Trust Center, and then Trust Center Settings...

    From within the Trust Center menu, click Trusted Locations. Make sure to check Allow Trusted Locations on my network. Then click Add new location..., and under Path: type in \fileserver.contoso.com\share. If applicable check Subfolders of this location are also trusted.

    I hope this helps you work around this issue. 

    Best Regards,

    Evan

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-03-12T11:35:56+00:00

    Unfortunately - none of the above is working for me.

    File is unblocked

    Trust Centre Settings - all protected view stuff is unchecked.

    Have tried changing the file (which is .xlsx) to .xls .csv

    Everything was fine yesterday until I tried to open this one file (which was downloaded from a trusted source) and now no excel files work.

    Have tried opening directly from the source and also saved to desktop on local disk.

    Have more memory and disk space than I can shake a stick at, so no problem there either.

    I need the contents of this file

    Any ideas?

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-07-04T12:45:58+00:00

    Hi I am having the same problem with ANY excel file that is downloaded from the web e-mail clients. 

    These are files created in the MS Excel originally, they are just downloaded on the local disk either from gmail (private mailbox) or from outlook web app (work mailbox).

    So this is not "google documents" problem, this is some sort of "security" problem of microsoft excel, that it "knows" file is being downloaded from somewhere.

    But the warning with free disk space or no memory is then really annoying if we talk 100kB file and 8GB of ram and 2TB of disk :o))).

    So I guess this should be fixed in next excel update...

    J.

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  4. Anonymous
    2013-05-18T10:21:00+00:00

    Hi Anula,

    That was a great reply. It worked out.

    Actually it was showing "The file came from another computer, which may harm your computer". There was an "Unblock" button, that helped me to open the file. But how to overcome this security blocking issue. As i understand, this should be a new feature on our MS Office 2013 Pro Plus. But is there any FIX that can overcome it? Else I may have to right click everytime, the file that i download from my email.

    Thanks.

    Guruprasad

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