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excelmemorylimit

excel 2007 memory limit

I would like to ask is there really no limit to the memory used by Excel 2007?

The microsoft specification says There's no limit

and I would like to verify it, but yet I Fail

My testing environment is: Windows7 64Bit, 4G Ram, not much memory in use

Here's what I have tried,

Create large integer array. This could only use 1G Ram. FAIL-->PROMPT OOM Error Create large string array, insert 1000 length string , uses 1.9G Ram. FAIL --> PROMPT OUT OF STRING SPACE

Create 1Million * 10 Columns data in a worksheet, keep duplicating it. Uses 1.9G Ram. FAIL --> Prompt some random error.

My Question is, is there really no memory limit or I have really used up all the free memory on my pc?

Solution

  • Excel memory limits vary by version. Excel 2007 is limited to a theoretical 2 Gigabytes of virtual memory, but in practical terms is often not able to use as much of that because of memory fragmentation problems etc. See http://www.decisionmodels.com/memlimitsc.htm for some more details.