Excel 2010 experts pls help! Having RAM issue.

J

jid

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Mar 2, 2009
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Before I search out an excel forum I thought I'd ask here. I'm using Excel 2010 x64 and have run into an issue where if my total system ram usage goes above 50% Excel crashes. I had 8GB in my desktop, windows 7 with all it's doo dats generally runs with less than 2GB, with my spreadsheets first opened I'd stay under 4GB but as I worked the usage just grew and grew and when it hit 4GB or exceeded it Excel would lock up at the first large operation and crashed. Out of impatience I simply upgraded to 16GB to avoid this since desktop ram was pretty cheap but it just seems ridiculous that I can only use 50% of my ram.

Now I have a laptop which I'll have to upgrade to 16GB, eventually my spreadsheets will grow and I think I'll hit the 8GB mark at some point in the future and crash again. The lappy can't do 32GB so I'll be stuck if I can't solve this problem. Also, it's silly I can't use most of my ram and Excel crashes. I needz help :(
 
Why are you using Excel for such large amounts of data? Have you tried opening them in PowerPivot instead?
 
Assuming you are running Windows 7 x64 and not x32, Excel 2010 x64 should have an 8000 GB memory limit. You'll want to read through this page carefully for troubleshooting RAM issue you had:

http://www.decisionmodels.com/memlimitsc.htm

You may have run into memory fragmentation. That page includes a list of things to do to reduce the amount of memory Excel uses; you may wish to try them out to increase performance if nothing else.
 
your Excel files are too big for Excel, time to move to a database of some sort or break them down smaller or you have some really badly written queries or something in them
 
I think I will have to break my spreadsheets down when I run into this issue again with 16GB on my lappy. The reason I use excel is because when I started this little project I had no idea I would just keep going with it untill it grew so large, I started off so small and excel was easy to learn. At this point its unrealistic for me to change, once I get to a certain point I will be able to think about switching to other software and probably I'll be able to cut the size of the spreadsheet down also. I was hoping to avoid breaking down my sheets because it's more time consuming to work that way but I've done it in the past with an older version of excel and I can do it again.

Thanks for the replies, I will see if I can make excel run more efficiently. I think I should be able to disable the feature that stores your actions and lets you "undo" them when you mess up, I believe I've done something like that in the old excel before and it frees up a ton of memory when you are working, you just have to make sure you save your work often.
 
are you doing any special queries or anything on your data to get totals or other mathematical Equations?

i had one of our employee's trying to open an excel file that took almost 4 hours on my i7 920 @ 3.9Ghz and 24G of ram and a\n inetl 80G ssd to run.....i assigned it to 7 threads which it maxed out %100 for those 4 hours...
 
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