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I have a spreadsheet with a small number of cells

  • 4 tabs.

  • The biggest circa 860 rows x 30 columns = 25800 cells

  • The size of the spreadsheet on disk is 225KB. (222,467 bytes)

  • The cell count in the other 3 sheets are negligible

  • I think I am under the limits described here!

Hardware:

  • (MBP 2016) Quad Core Intel i7
  • 16GB Memory
  • Activity Monitor says 7.29GB memory used at the time it happens.

OS:

  • OS Monterey 12.7.3 - upgrade to OS occurred last night. My gut tells me something here broke Excel.

Excel version:

  • Excel for Mac 16.81 (24011420)
  • Licence: Microsoft 365 Subscription

I have used far bigger spreadsheets before today with no issue!

Any ideas?

I have tried:

  1. clearing content of rows below,
  2. copying data to a new spreadsheet
  3. rebooting.

All to no avail.

The moment I try and enter or paste new data and hit enter in a cell I get this issue.

A screenshot is here

Others can open and add data with no issues on other hardware - probably Windows users - I shared spreadsheet internally with my colleagues in Teams.

I also tried contacting Microsoft Support - but gave up after about 20 min - when I Googled the response time was 2-6 hours!

I also ferreted around looking for answers in Excel log files located in this folder - nothing jumped out at me:

  • /Users/___/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Excel/Data/Library/Logs/Diagnostics/EXCEL

  • ___ - substitute your login id for folder name.

I also posted here too.

Finally:

But neither of these made any sense to me.

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6
  • Try copying out the data in each tab into a new sheet for each tab, then merge them back into a new sheet. How are you sharing the sheet?
    – IconDaemon
    Commented Jan 30 at 13:14
  • As I've said I tried creating a new sheet.. Manually adding tabs and copying only cells with data. Same issue occurs when I work with new sheet. Tried saving/closing Excel/reopening etc
    – JGFMK
    Commented Jan 30 at 13:15
  • But did you copy each tab into its own new sheet, not all 4 tabs copied wholesale? 'Copying data into a new sheet' implies a wholesale copy. Perhaps the problem is data in one of the tabs. The Monterey update may have something to do with it, as this is the only (somewhat momentous) change to the setup.
    – IconDaemon
    Commented Jan 30 at 13:37
  • Individual rows and cells where data existed for each sheet. Adding sheets manually and renaming things to match in a brand new workbook. So in the big one down to about row 860 and across to column AC. Then when I saved new spreadsheet, closed and re-opened it, the new one exhibited the exact same behaviour.
    – JGFMK
    Commented Jan 30 at 13:39
  • Is there an Excel tag on Ask Different? I wanted to be more specific with tagging. Can't seem to find it.
    – JGFMK
    Commented Jan 30 at 13:48

1 Answer 1

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Right. I put the spreadsheet into Teams, and opened the file in a browser with Sharepoint. When I pasted the data this time, I got a more informative pop up! See here Someone has created a size constraint imposed on characters a column could contain. Mac's version sucks for its crypticness by comparison. I blew 4 hours on this!

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4
  • I'd call Bill Gates immediately! /s I feel your pain JGFMK. I had to manage the Office Suite at my workplace for many users for many years. Fortunately, we switched to the Google enterprise suite, and I moved on to other things at my institution. I do need to maintain the Office Suite at home, though, for my wife's business, but it is only one user.
    – IconDaemon
    Commented Jan 30 at 14:30
  • I think Bill has long since gone!
    – JGFMK
    Commented Jan 30 at 14:53
  • I could not reproduce this on my machine (Excel 16.81, MacOS 14.2.1). Right after I try to navigate away from cell with data validation rule in place and where more than allowed characters were entered I got: "This value doesn’t match the data validation restrictions defined for this cell.". Same message is displayed when I try to save file (without navigating away from cell)
    – Aivar Paalberg
    Commented Jan 30 at 14:58
  • The hardware of my Mac prevents me from going higher. I've been stuck back on Monterey.
    – JGFMK
    Commented Feb 7 at 6:29

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