The layout
A server in an office connects 5 computers running windows 7 and using MS office plus 2010(32bit) and 1 computer running XP using MS office plus 2007(32bit), they are all 64bit OS's besides xp. They share many spreadsheets that are opened, edited and updated simultaneously off the server. Since the spreadsheets need to be referred to each other, 2 up to 5 excel files must be opened on the computer I'm working on.

I'm working with a computer that has the following error during reading and writing to spreadsheets.
"Excel cannot complete this task with available resources choose less data or close Other applications"
This error occurs simply because excel has used up all the resources. However I'd like to avoid the simple "close redundant spreadsheets" because sooner or later they will need to be used.

The problem is that its only one computer that is having this problem all other computers don't get this error despite having equal amount of spreadsheets opened as the problematic computer. We've upgraded the ram and graphics card on that computer yet problem persists. I'm aware of the 2gb ram access restriction office 32bit has.

The only solution I can think of would be to install a 64 it version of office on this computer set the default program that opens the file to the 64bit excel version (only for the problematic computer). Will cause errors? Seeing as other computers run 32bit office?

Does anyone know of any other ways of doing this? When the error occurs the file is locked and all data that is entered into the file after that is lost. Thanks in advanced

Hi,

Do these five pcs have the same hardware?

As far as I know, the above memory error messages can be very generic and don't always identify the real cause of the issue. Please follow the KBs below, try the methods and check if they are helpful.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2779852

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2655178

Then, I agree with you, we can update the Excel to 64bit version. Because the max RAM usage of the Excel 2010 32bit version is 2 GB. Even if we add more physical memory, 32bit version wont be able to use it.  I recommend you use Excel 64bit version to open/edit the large workbook instead. The 64-bit version of Excel 2010 is not constrained to 2 GB of RAM usage like 32-bit applications does.

Hope it's helpful.

Regards,

George Zhao
TechNet Community Support