Microsoft Excel for Mac 2011 was crashing whenever I attempted to open iton a MacBook Pro laptop I use. Whenever I attempted to reopen it, I would bepresented one by one with files to reopen that had been open when it crashed.
I have Office 2008 for Mac. Prior to yesterday morning, I had no issues with Excel or Word. They are all that I use from Office. I tried to open Excel yesterday and I am getting the message 'not enough memory.' I now get it for both Excel and Word. I don't understand how this can be. I have very few documents saved to Word and Excel. As we already discussed that each of the Microsoft Excel versions such as Microsoft Excel 2007, Excel 2010, and Excel 2013 32-bit is set to 2 GB of memory which is also called the internal heap space. Along with the memory, each of the instances is also set to the 32,760 source cells to do a smart fill operation.
If I chose to reopen all of the workbooks, it would display the message 'Notenough memory.' then crash again. The problem occurred even afterI closed other applications that were open and rebooted the systemto minimize the amount of memory used by other processes runningon the system.
Whenever you attempt to reopen Excel after it has crased with files open,it may prompt you to recover changes to those files from AutoRecovery filesit created. The AutoRecovery files for Microsoft Office 2011 arestored under a user's home directory at ~/Library/ApplicationSupport/Microsoft/Office/Office 2011 AutoRecovery. For Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac they are storedat ~Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office2008/AutoRecovery.
The files are stored as Excel binary worksheet (BIFF12) .xlsb files, even if the original fileyou had opened was an Excel Binary File Format .xls or Office Open XML-based and macro-enabled file - seeFile formats that are supported in Excel for further information on Excel file formats. The XLSB format is alsoreferred to as BIFF12, which stands for 'binary file format for Office 12', which was introduced in Microsoft Office 2007, which was codenamed 'Office 12', and supported in Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac and later versions. An XLSBfile is a ZIP containeras are .docx filescreated by Microsoft Word. On a Mac OS X system, you can extract thecontents of a .xlsb file, if it hasn't been corrupted by an Excel crash, from a command line interface (CLI) using the Terminal application found in /Applications/Utilities, e.g.unzip example.xlsb.
I copied one of the files that I had edited, for which I needed the latestversion to retain changes I had made to the document in the last week, to another location, but found that it was only 171 bytes, far toosmall to contain all of the data in the spreadsheet. The originalfile name was MSGRS.xls whereas the AutoRecovery filewas named ~$MSGRS (version 1).xlsb . Note: if you seea '$' in the file name you will need to 'escape' its meaning witha backslash character which serves as an escape character, taking away its special meaning to a Bash shell, when copying the file with the cp command.
Note: if you are copying the file from directory where Microsoft Office stores the AutoRecovery files from a Terminal window without enclosing the path in quotes, you will also need to use the backslash character to'escape' the spaces and parentheses by placing it immediately before thosecharacters. Otherwise you will receive an 'unexpected token error message.
In this case, I couldn't extract the contents for the .xlsb file withthe unzip utility, since it was a corrupted, incomplete file.
On a system running Apple's OS X operating system, crash reports for auser's account are stored in ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/,so I checked on the file name for the last Excel crash report. Crash reportsare stored with a file name that begins with the application name, whichis followed by a time stamp, then the name of the system, and then a.crash at the end of the file name.
When I checked on what was listed for the cause of the crash in the filesby looking for the line that immediately follows the 'Application SpecificInformation:' line in the files with grep -A 1 'Application SpecificInformation:, I saw 'stack overflow' listed for the last three crashes.
I wasn't able to determine the cause of the stack overflow, but, sinceI saw several files only 171 bytes in length in the AutoRecovery directory,which meant I wouldn't actually be able to use them to recover any recentchanges, and, other than the MSGRS.xls one, whichappeared to be unrecoverable at this point, I didn't need to recoverany of the others, I chose to reopen Excel again, but not attemptto reopen any of the previously opened files when I was promptedto reopen them. That allowed Excel to open normally without crashing.After re-entering data into the last saved version of theMSGRS.xls spreadsheet, when I closed Excel, I saw thatthere were no longer any files in the AutoRecovery folder.
I later noticed that Excel, when itautosaves documents, willput a file with 'AutoSave' at the beginning of the file name in theAutoRecovery directory. E.g., I saw the following when I had a filenamed pending_removal.csv open in Excel.
References:
Not Enough Memory To Run Microsoft Excel Mac
- Microsoft Excel quit unexpectedly
Date: March 11, 2016
MoonPoint Support - New Binary File Format for Spreadsheets
By: Doug Mahugh/Microsoft
Date: August 22, 2006
Microsoft Software DeveloperNetwork (MSDN) Blogs - Determining the version of Microsoft Word used to edit a .docx Document
Date: December 31, 2104
MoonPoint Support - File formats that are supported in Excel
Microsoft Office help and training - Office Support
Posted by Jeff Nyveen on November 27, 1999 8:33 PM
i have two potentially related problems that have been frustrating me for some time now. i read all the message boards and did web searches, but haven't been able to find any answers. maybe you can help.
i use excel98 for the mac, and i have created a spreadsheet of formulas to use on stock data that i get via a VBA web query. i create a list of stock ticker symbols, and then i call on my macro to go down that list of tickers, retrieve historical quote data from MSN Investor on the web, and then apply a series of formulas to the data i have collected.
works fine for the first few tickers, but after 4 or 5, apparently during the web query portion of my macro, i get a 'Not enough memory' error which halts the macro till i click 'OK'. it then proceeds to give me exactly 14 more of the same 'Not enough memory' errors, which i have to click 'OK' for, before continuing with the macro and moving onto the next ticker in the list.
problem is, i was hoping to run the macro for 1000 tickers at a time. and these error messages get to be quite a nuisance.
i've also noticed that after the error-filled macro finishes, i save the data in my file, close it, and try to re-open it, i am left with a useless file. every time i try to open it, i watch the little 'opening file' bar graphic on the bottom of the screen open the file halfway before presenting me with the exact same 'Not enough memory' error message that the macro did. i have tried using virtual memory and allocating more RAM to Excel, but it doesn't seem to make a difference.
i tried performing the same macro my brothers PC (with Excel97), and i get the same error messages.
i would be more than happy to share the code and/or the file if you think you could help me figure out the problem.
thanks.
-jeff nyveen
Jeff
Not sure, but maybe this will help
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q183/8/47.ASP
Not Enough Memory Excel For Mac 2011 Free
Ivan