Unable to block copy/paste in same workbook

[allewyn]

When I try to cut (or copy and paste) inside the same workbook I see this message:

"Excel cannot complete this task with available resources. Choose less data or close other applications"

I have no other applications open and this only happens in this workbook. Somehow and suddenly the workbook is messed up. Did I hit a switch or something?
I am using Office 2010 on Win7 with 2GB ram

 

[drj30026abanba]

What kind of things are in that workbook? When workbooks get like 100 worksheets and lots of pivot tables it can slow things down some. What seems to cause this for me is that there is a lot of blank cells Excel thinks its using. If you go on a sheet and press Ctrl+End, it takes you to the last cell Excel thinks it's using, it's used range. If its way off somewhere where there is nothing then you can delete everything that is blank up to your data. And by delete I don't just mean the delete key to clear contents. I mean delete the entire row with Ctrl and the minus key on the number pad or right clicking on a row or column and selecting delete. Using the delete key just clears the contents and doesn't clear the formats or comments. Once you save and close Excel, the file size might go down and then when you open it up again it could be faster and not freeze on copying and pasting. You'd have to check all the worksheets for this.

 

[allewyn]

Ok, the end was at the absolute last cell in the worksheet at that was too much too delete. What I did finally was copy everything to another worksheet and then delete the offending sheet.

All that was in the original worksheet were alpha-numeric strings and there were only 4 sheets. But it did think it was using the entire sheet for some reason. Thanks drj30026abanba

 

[drj30026abanba]

Well I'm glad it seems to be working out for you. There's a quick way to delete all the columns and rows that are unused all at once. If you go to the first blank column and press Ctrl+Spacebar, it selects the entire column. Then you can hold Ctrl+Shift+Right Arrow and then that will expand the selection (Shift) to the next place there is a value (Ctrl) to the right (Right Arrow). Since there is nothing it will go to the very end. The you can right click on the letters at the stop and select delete. Or use Ctrl+Minus Sign on the number pad. You can do a similar thing for rows. To select the entire rows of a selection you use Shift+Spacebar instead.