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: