Ever since Office 2010, Excel has become more and more burdened with memory issues. The most common problems I have seen are hangs, crashes, errors about resources, and problems with cut/copy/paste. This has occurred more and more often with each subsequent build of Excel. The symptoms have become more apparent as Excel Spreadsheets have become more and more complex. Users have become more savvy with formulas, pivot tables, slicers, etc. And Excel has started using more and more memory to enable these features. The problem is 32-bit architecture on a system. Although application are supposed to have 4GB of memory, Excel is actually limited to 2GB where the system uses the other 2GB for shared process memory.
Now, there is a fix which makes Excel 2013 and 2016 “Large Address Aware.” This is a feature of Windows that limits memory for the system to 1GB, freeing up 3GB for Excel. This should help tremendously. Most of the problems reported with Excel usage should decrease as a result of this. For more information on this fix, see:
With 64-bit Excel, we see some of Excel instances use up to 10GB memory already. But Excel 2016 memory allocation was not very smooth and occasionally we see sudden and large jumps in memory (1 to 2GBs) with some simple operations on worksheet. Are there any changes or enhancement to Excel 2016 memory optimization in the pipeline?
Not other than this one. Are you still seeing this problem? And what is happening in Excel. Are large workbooks being opened? Some operations are also not as simple as they seem. Especially if there are add-ins or code behind that fires when these operations start or complete. The key test is to launch Excel with the “/safe” switch than perform the same operations and see if you get the same jump. If you do try again from a blank/new workbook. If it does not happen with /safe then it is likely an issue with an add-in. If it does not happen with a new blank workbook then it is likely there is something bigger going on in the workbook you are using. If it happens in a new workbook, then it might be the operation. I would be interested to know that that is and look into it for you.