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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183 additional answers

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  1. Anonymous
    2018-01-23T18:01:23+00:00

    Thanks Gus Cop!

    It worked like a charm.

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-01-23T17:59:21+00:00

    Awesome Gus Cops!

    Worked like a charm.

    Thanks a bunch!

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-01-18T12:14:24+00:00

    I am having the same issue, can not open excel or word. I do hope someone replies to us.

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-01-03T15:35:59+00:00

    Does anyone else have any other suggestions? This situation started after we had a ransom virus run through our system and we recovered much of the user files from a backup. But after that, this error has haunted me. I cannot start a new Excel spreadsheet or perform a SaveAs.

    My temps folders have all been cleared multiple times, I have over 280Gavailable on the disk drive, and I have already unchecked all the MS Protected View options as @mehmoodahmad suggested.

    If I start a brand new user profile or log in as someone else on that same machine, everything works fine and the error is not recreated, i.e.  I can create a new spreadsheet and perform a Save As. So there is some setting in some file or some file that is still corrupted on this machine in my user space. I've renamed the template document, Normal.dotm in hopes that Excel would create a new one in case that was causing the error. But there was no change, I still got the out of space error. Yes, I could start with the new profile, but that is far more work than I'm willing to do right now. There has to be a solution to this someplace, I just need some more ideas.

    Thanks all for any and all suggestions.

    Using Office365 Business Version 1711.

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