How to increase available memory for Excel 5.0a?

[1200XL M.U.L.E.]

One of my goals in increasing the RAM in my Centris 650 is to load very large spreadsheets of financial data and have the computer churn through all of my calculations, no matter how painful it may seem.

It looks like I am unable to load anything beyond 1.6MB. I stumbled upon this when I clicked on "About Microsoft Excel".



The screen here says I only slightly under 1.8MB available. How is this possible? Am I missing a configuration setting somewhere that would open this up to whatever amount of RAM I have?

If not then is there another spreadsheet program that can use all of my memory?

 

[ymk]

Select the application in the Finder and go to File -> Get Info.

You should be able to allocate more memory there.

 

[1200XL M.U.L.E.]

Thank you @ymk ! I did not know I could do this!

Edit : It looks like the maximum value this can be set to is 65,535kB, or 65MB.

 

[CC_333]

Edit : It looks like the maximum value this can be set to is 65,535kB, or 65MB.

Unless you're trying to do something truly outlandish, that should be enough.

However, you should first make sure you have more than 65 MB installed in your machine, because if you set Excel to the maximum of 65 MB, and you only have 65 MB or less installed, best case is that Excel will complain about a lack of memory and refuse to run, and worst case is that it'll run, and then crash, potentially taking Mac OS down with it.

EDIT: Try setting it to 16 MB (about 10x what it is now) and see if that is sufficient for the files you want to open, and if it's not, increase in small increments until it is.

c

 

[Phipli]

Thank you @ymk ! I did not know I could do this!

Edit : It looks like the maximum value this can be set to is 65,535kB, or 65MB.

I didn't think there was a maximum that low? I allocated SimpleText 120MB messing a while back.

 

[Phipli]

7.5.x didn't stop me?

 

[Phipli]

One of my goals in increasing the RAM in my Centris 650 is to load very large spreadsheets of financial data and have the computer churn through all of my calculations, no matter how painful it may seem.

Have you had a look at Matlab, MathCAD and Mathematica? For interesting scientific / mathematics software?

 

[1200XL M.U.L.E.]

The 65,535kB maximum was seen when I open up the "About Microsoft Excel 5.0a". It didn't register the 131072kB I entered.

MatLab, Mathematica, and MathCAD are coming. My backlog here to explore is huge! Plus, I am still learning the basic ins and outs of the platform. I mean, I didn't even know the basic capability of allocating memory.

 

[Phipli]

The 65,535kB maximum was seen when I open up the "About Microsoft Excel 5.0a". It didn't register the 131072kB I entered.

Oh right, Microsoft issue, not OS.

I wouldn't be that it doesn't work with it. More likely the dialogue box cannot display the number. Who knows. It's a bug in Excel.

 

[CC_333]

Oh right, Microsoft issue, not OS.

I wouldn't be that it doesn't work with it. More likely the dialogue box cannot display the number. Who knows. It's a bug in Excel.

It's likely because of the fact that, since 65 MB was considered to be quite a lot of RAM for the time, they didn't bother fixing that bug (in 1995, most Macs (save for maybe the top-of-the-line models) came from the factory with anywhere from 8 to 32 MB of RAM, and upgrading much beyond that was considered an expensive luxury that most couldn't easily afford until much later, long after that particular version of Excel was first sold).

c

 

[68kPlus]

I've also had luck with using OptiMem with my Mac Plus to squeeze more available RAM out of my OS 7.5.5 install. It managed about ~200KB more than stock.
For those with RAM upgrade challenged Macs, it's a good tool!