'Not enough memory' when opening Excel, Word or ppt

Thanks, Charley. Your solution worked for me. I frequently received the "Not enough memory" message when attempting to delete rows or columns. I did as you suggested, and the problem was solved. Much appreciated.

What version of Mac OS X?

What version of Office?

Use this article to set up Activity Monitor with a typical mix of what you have open:

Using Activity Monitor to read System Memory and determine how much RAM is being used

How much total memory in your Mac?

How much of the pie is green?

How much is green + Blue>

How many pageouts?

How much swap used?

MacBook Pro
https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro

Those are some of the forums for your model. And I am sure that you are only running iOS on iDevices and not on your laptop.

For all we know you are also low on disk space and down to 15% free is dangerously little.

And where did you get lost in the proposed solutions? maybe someone could explain or look at the web page and whether it does or is not applicable.

Perhaps one of the memory cards in your machine has gone bad. You might need to replace it. Open up "About This Mac", and check to see how much memory is shown in the pop-up window. If it shows maybe 2GBs you might very well need new memory. Click the "more info" button, then "System Report" button, then press "Memory". It will show you if your memory is "OK".

You can check with OWC at macsale.com, and navigate to their memory tab, and check the memory you can buy by clicking thru the options. I think 8GBs today goes for about $60 USD.

You've enough RAM - it could be a problem with Office 2008 itself (oh, how much free space do you have on your hard drive?).

I would venture over to the Microsoft forums - http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macoffice2008?tm=1353411610259 is the link for 'all topics' for 2008. Do a search first and if you can't find a previous message that will help, try asking your own question.

Good luck,

Clinton

Oops. M/S 2008 might be the problem. Here isa M/S blog on 2011, and 2008 compstibility with 10.8.

See http://blog.officeformac.com/were-ready-for-mountain-lion/

It still might be worth an upgade to Office 2011 and more memory.

Sometimes an error message isn't accurate. Since you seem to have enough memory, it sounds like the error message is not correctly describing the actual problem. And it's probably not your fault. You will probably have to discuss it on a Microsoft user forum or with Microsoft technical support.

Alec71 wrote:

Hi,

Thank you to those who have replied.

Problem remains unsolved.

Here is what I am running.

OS X Version : 10.8.2

Processor : 2.4 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo

Memory : 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3

Start Up Disk : Macintosh HD

Russa,

thank you for your post. I followed your advice and it states the memory is OK.

Grant,

thank you for your post.

I am using Microsoft Office 2008.

I used the Activity monitor to read System Memory to determine how much RAM is being used:

In response to your Questions:

Total Memory in the Mac = 4 GB

Free (Green) = 1.41 GB (1 third of the pie)

Wired (Red) = 733.7 MB

Active (Yellow) = 1.64 GB

Inactive (Blue) = 232.6 MB

Used = 2.58 GB

Page Outs = 0 bytes (0 bytes / sec)

Swap used = 0 bytes

Does anyone have any solutions now I have provided a bit more information?

Thank you, I can't function without being able to access word & excel.

Reinstall Office 2008.

Russa wrote:

Oops. M/S 2008 might be the problem. Here isa M/S blog on 2011, and 2008 compstibility with 10.8.

See http://blog.officeformac.com/were-ready-for-mountain-lion/

It still might be worth an upgade to Office 2011 and more memory.

Office 2008 is also compatible with ML (but some add-ons are not so be careful which ones you install, this also applies to Office 2011 for Mac)

I transferred excel file to another Desktop Computer (Window PC) using Dropbox. Opened it there (Window PC) without any problem, i could edit & save it. Then i closed it & opened it on by mac book air. It opened, i could edit it & save it without any problem. It worked for me.

Not sure it was the same as you, but I was just in a similar situation. I couldn't do much in a particular opened file as to delete a column would give me a "No enough memory" in Excel2011. Suddenly I realized my 300KB file was 10MB now. I had done something which increased (a lot!) the size of the file.

Then, I selected the contents of the spreadsheet I was working on and copy/pasted to a new file. This new file was again 300KB and everything started to work back again.

I hope it helps.

Charley.