Vbox and memory for Excel

[par60056]

I have some very large things I do using Microsoft Excel. The company wants me to get them off the PC and onto the Mac.

Too bad there are so many flaws in Excel for Mac that it can't be done in there.

So I thought I'd try running them in a virtual box. Most of the things work fine. But if I select 550 rows by 24 columns and try to Copy it, Excel puts up a message "Excel cannot complete this task with the available resources. Choose less data or close other applications" 500 rows by 24 columns works just fine.

13000 cells is a small copy operation for me.

I have 2G allocated to the Virtualbox and the windows Task manager is showing I am only using 533M.

Any ideas what I can do to make this work? Administration is not my thing.

[rpmurray]

Excel cannot complete this task with the available ...

[par60056]

Followed the suggestions on that page. Cleared %temp% (there is 20G free on the drive so I don't know why that would help), changed the printer (not doing anything with the printer but who knows with MS) still having the error.

The same operations work flawlessly on a true PC running Windows. They only fail when running the same version of windows and the same version of Excel inside of virtualbox.

[rpmurray]

I notice you haven't provided us with the version of Windows or the version of Excel that you're running in VirtualBox. About all I can do is throw the bones and read some tea leaves and give some wild-ass guesses based on what my mind reading skills tell me about your system but that would be a waste of my time and yours. For now, all I can suggest is to try searching with Google like I did.

[par60056]

Sorry. Thought I had said that I am get the same error with both Excel 2007 and 2010.

I am using Windows XP on both the virtual box and the PC that I am trying to replace by using virtual box.

I tried many searches before posting here. Since What I am trying to do works perfectly well on PC hardware running the same OS with the same patch levels but fails miserably in the virtual box I was hoping somebody else using virtual box had run into the issue.

[par60056]

following your advice and several more hours spent on google...

Found somebody that said:

My c+p problem was caused by virtualbox's shared clipboard feature.

Ah Now I see. Virtualbox's shared clipboard is probably running out of space to handle the HUGE Copy/paste operations that are done pretty commonly in the processes I have to run.

So is there any way to control the size of the shared clipboard or to disable it and reenable it?

[Perryg]

The shared clipboard can in fact be enabled/disabled in the guest settings General -> advanced.

[rpmurray]

par60056, if the shared clipboard does turn out to be the cause of your error, please post that here to help anyone in the future who may run into this problem. If you still get the error, please attach a zipped copy of the most recent log file for the guest to your reply so we can see if there's something in your settings that might be at fault.

[par60056]

I see the setting under general-> advanced to disable the clipboard. Are changes to those settings only effective when starting the virtual machine or can they be changed while running? Except when I am running these huge excel processes I want to be able to cut and paste between the 2 OSes. I see the guest additions icon in the icon tray. I was hoping that I could open it there and make the change to the clipboard on a temporary basis. But neither left or right click on the icon does anything.

I will keep investigating and hopefully post something further shortly.

[par60056]

OK I found the setting can only be changed that way when the machine is running. I shut the machine down and now it fails to reopen.

Result Code:
NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005)
Component:
Console
Interface:
IConsole {1968b7d3-e3bf-4ceb-99e0-cb7c913317bb}

Now I have a real problem!

[par60056]

Cloned Virtualbox, discarded saved state changed the setting back to bidirectional and the box came up. I will investigate further when I DON'T have a critical project due in 2 days.