Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated March 3, 2025)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021
When Edward right-clicks on the intersection point between the row headers and the column headers, Excel selects the entirety of all the columns and rows and displays a Context menu. If he chooses Copy from the Context menu, Edward gets an error message that "Excel cannot complete this task with available resources. Choose less data or close other applications." This problem comes up even if he tries this on a blank worksheet. Edward can copy individual columns or rows, but not the entirety of them. He wonders what is causing this problem, even on blank worksheets.
The cause of the problem is that Excel, when copying cells, needs to store information about those cells to the Clipboard. This occurs even in the case of cells that are blank. When you select all the cells in workbook and then choose to copy them, you are copying information on over 17 billion cells to the Clipboard—16,384 columns multiplied by 1,048,576 rows. That's a lot of data, even for blank cells! Unless your system has lots and lots of memory available, this method of copying just won't work.
If your objective is to copy an entire worksheet, there is a much simpler way to do it. Just right-click on the worksheet's tab and choose Move or Copy. Excel displays a dialog box that allows you to specify how you want to make the copy, including the ability to copy the worksheet to a new workbook. The benefit to this approach is that Excel treats the worksheet as a whole, single unit rather than dealing with over 17 billion individual units (cells). It also does the copy without utilizing the Clipboard, which means it is less reliant on memory available in your system.
If you do want to copy cells, then the best way to that is to select cell A1 and then press Shift+Ctrl+End. This selects all the cells currently being used in the workbook. Provided you have enough memory in your system, you should be able to copy those (Ctrl+C) and paste them where you would like.
Finally, there is one other consideration to keep in mind—there are limits to what you can do with the memory in your system. Even if your system has a boatload of memory, what you are able to do in Excel will depend on the demands placed on that memory by other programs you may have running on the system. In other words, if you have a lot of programs running on your system, it will limit your ability to perform memory-intensive tasks within Excel.
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2025-03-03 07:32:42
jamies
Copying worksheets is almost certainly the way to go if the destination is the same workbook as the source..
Then, consider getting rid of links and formulas in the copy -
Copy, Paste Special Values,
There may be glitches where there are "named" formulas, validation, or ranges with the names pointing to the specific sheet
And even more where there are macro's or UDF's that reference a sheet -
especially by the "internal" name assigned within VBA, or the Excel creation id of a sheet
Re the too much data for the clipboard, there is also the annoyance where there is no "enhancement to the clipboard function, so you cannot select the previously copied data - and there is another process using the clipboard so the "default" data on the clipboard changes between the copy and paste into Excel -
Also - for niceness - if you copied a large amount of data and don't need that in the clipboard -
copy a single cell so that Excel and the clipboard both release the RAM used to hold the mass of copied data.
Also - as Excel seems to acquire RAM to process all the data in the rows of a worksheet, but for a limited number (block) of columns at a time
you are less likely to have memory limit problems copying large sheets of data a few columns at a time.
- And ..
if copying a block of rows or columns, Excel may not include the column width,or row height settings - especially autofit - as part of the generalised copy and paste process -
so to have those heights and width settings copied you may have to copy the rows or columns rather than just a block of cells .
Now - copying formulas -
a way to have formula references not changed -
change formulas to text by replacing all = characters with something like the string £$%^ or any string that is not found in the data cells to be copied
then after the paste - change them, in the source and pasted destination back to the = character.
For that on both the source and the pasted entries, and that should get the formulas etc. set to use the same (relative to the worksheet) cells as the source did.
If you want to replicate blocks of cells, having them point to cells with the same relative offsets from the pasted location,
move the source before the change of the = in the source so you can paste into the same cell address as the copied source.
Do remember to realign the source back to where it should be !
OK, there is the OFFSET() and the ADDRESS function as well as working in R1C1 mode with RANGE( CELL(row,column),CELL(row,column)) addressing using row numbers, and column numbers, or letters and - do remember ROW() and COLUMN() functions as well as
GETPIVOTDATA()
getting parts of an address from a formula MID(FORMULARTEXT( A1 or R1c1 mode,,),,)
SORT
TRIMRANGE
=ADDRESS(MAX(ROW(A1:D55)),MAX(COLUMN(A1:D55)),4)
AND THE VARIOUS RESULTS FROM A GOOGLE? SEARCH ON
Get the last non-empty cell in a column in Excel
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