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The system:

Alienware Area-51 M5790 Laptop - Vista Ultimate
Intel Core Duo T7400 @ 2.16GHz
2046 MB RAM
Office 2007 Professional

The scenario:
On boot up the system is using about 45% of the RAM. Open Excel, open a spreadsheet (72 KB file size) that was created in Excel 2007 that consists of 3 sheets, (2 with very little content) and one with decent amount of content. The unusual part about this doc is that about 3 cells have in the range of 5000 words in them. The rest number from just a few to several hundred (total number of words in the file is around 22,000 words). After launching this and a few other windows including Word and IE it still is under 50%. But as soon as I start copying and pasting and entering content into it and working in the file, the used RAM goes up to 85% or more. And slowly over the next several minutes climbs to 95%+.

I thought this had something to do with the undo/redo but if I save and close the file but leave Excel open it is still over 90% RAM. Task manager shows Excel is using close to 1GB of RAM.

So my question is why? And is there anything I can do to not get my system resources all maxed out like that (eventually it does hit 100% and starts really going slow).

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Dani AI

Generated

correctly identified the pattern: heavy memory growth happens when Excel moves large cell contents or large ranges, not just when the file sits open. Excel 2007 (32‑bit) has a per‑instance internal heap limit and uses that heap for tracking cells, formulas and copy/paste operations — very large text blocks or big copy/fill operations can exhaust that heap and make the Excel process grow toward 1–2 GB. More on Excel’s per‑instance limits and copy/paste behavior.

Practical workarounds and what they do (applied one at a time, starting with the least disruptive):

  • Use Paste Special → Values when moving large text so formatting/objects aren’t carried in multiple clipboard formats. Paste Special / Values details.
  • Clear the Office Clipboard (Home → Clipboard → Clear All) or disable “Collect without showing Office Clipboard” to avoid Office storing many formats. How to clear/use the Office Clipboard.
  • Cancel Cut/Copy mode after big moves (press Esc or programmatically set Application.CutCopyMode = False) to remove temporary clipboard state inside Excel. Application.CutCopyMode reference.
  • Break very large edits into smaller chunks or split huge text fields out of the workbook (store giant text in .txt/Word and link if needed). Microsoft documents the “break into smaller operations / separate instances” approach for heavy copy/fill tasks. Excel memory guidance.

Opening the problem workbook in its own Excel instance can isolate heap use (start Excel with the /x switch or use a separate process) instead of letting one Excel process host multiple large workbooks. If basic fixes fail, updating Office 2007 to the latest service pack/hotfixes or repairing the Office install is a sensible next step (reinstall is a last resort). How to open a separate instance and SP3 info · Office 2007 SP3 summary.

Note: ’s reinstall suggestion will clear persistent corruption or missing hotfixes, but the targeted clipboard / paste / instance workarounds above often fix the high‑RAM symptom without a full reinstall.

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Member Avatar for jcp411

Ok, a bit more testing shows that the spike happens when I cut a paste about 15 rows that are more or less empty. But the fact that they probably go to some crazy infinity number uses the RAM through the roof.

Just cutting+pasting the cells within the window which is all I need seems to not do the same thing. Or at least as bad... still sort of annoying... :( and something that would be nice to have a fix on.

Member Avatar for jcp411

Found this PDF file that seems to have some good thoughts on general RAM issues with Excel.

Member Avatar for linux

You could always search this at Microsoft...

Or reinstall Office. That always works.

System restore to when this started?

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