Error message “Not enough resources to complete this operation"

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I am working with a database that exports a very large matrix (of the order of over 200,000 rows and about 2,000 columns (i.e., about 400,000,000 cells) and I need to manage some of this information in Excel.

Obviously it was impossible to use Excel from Office 2003 so I resorted to the Excel from Office 2007 which apparently had no limitations in the size of the file to open. The text file generated by my database is near 1 Gb (actually 970,000 Mb) and it is a mixture of integer numbers, real numbers, and text names.

However, in trying to open it with Excel 2007 with an XP Pro, when apparently the file was finishing being imported, the following message error appears: Not enough resources to complete this operation. Please close other applications and try again.

Looking in Internet I guessed that my problem might probably be a hardware problem because (in theory) Excel 2007 has no limit in the number of rows and columns (or at least within a range of 1 million rows and 16,000 columns). I was working under an XP Pro operating system with an old but quite powerful laptop (A DELL Precision M90 with a 32 bit Intel Core2 Duo Processor T7600 (2.33GHz/667MHz/4MB) and 4 Gb RAM memory) but despite this I thought that my hardware was the reason of my difficulties.

So I took my 1 Gb text file to a colleague that had just purchased a new PC (a 64 bit Intel i7 microprocessor with 8 nuclei, 8 Gb of RAM memory, 1 Tb 7200 rpm of disk space, Windows 7 Pro, and the 64 bits Office 2007). Well, as you can guess I got the same message Not enough resources to complete this operation (even if that new PC had been re-started just before this try).

I would appreciate to know if other people have had similar problems, and in that case how they have solved the problem (evidently it is not a question of hardware capability, but maybe a question of hardware configuration, e.g., memory allocation for Excel?). I even considered the purchase of the Office 2010 but I am afraid that similar problems may still arise.

Thank you very much,

 

 

Per Charles Williams...
"Excel uses its own pools of memory (Excel useable memory) for this workbook data. Unfortunately these memory pools are not in general as large as the Windows memory, and may well be a lot less than the RAM on your PC. Excel 95, Excel 97 and Excel 2000 have a limit for workbook formula memory of about 80 MB, and Excel 2002 has a limit of about 160MB. Excel 2003 has a limit of 1 GB and Excel 2007 has a limit which is controlled by Windows, allowing 2 GB, although differences between Excel 2003 and 2007 mean that you may not be able to use larger workbooks with 2007 than with 2003"
His website is at... Decision Models

You are trying to put 10 lbs into a 5 lb bag.
'--
Jim Cone
Portland, Oregon USa
http://www.mediafire.com/PrimitiveSoftware

JIM: Thank you very much. I don't understand why, after saying that "Excel 2003 has a limit of 1 GB and Excel 2007 has a limit which is controlled by Windows, allowing 2 GB" then you say that "differences between Excel 2003 and 2007 mean that you may not be able to use larger workbooks with 2007 than with 2003".

The fact is that I am importing directly into Excel 2007 from a text file, so that has nothing to do with Excel 2003. And if I am using a 62 bit processor under Windows 7 with 8 Gb of RAM, and if "...Windows controls the limit in Excel 2007 allowing 2 GB"then, why it claims I does not have enough resources?

Maybe I missed something. Thank you very mkuch,

Metatri

 

The quote provided was from Charles Williams not from me.
Your experience tends to prove that what Williams said is correct.

What I said was... "You are trying to put 10 lbs into a 5 lb bag"
Perhaps, I should have said: You are going to have to find some other way to get the job done.

Maybe you can use Excel to extract a sample of the data that is within Excel's memory limits.