Connecting Excel file

Hi Patrycja,

Thank you for the forum question.


The error message you're encountering in Power BI Desktop indicates that your system doesn't have enough available memory to complete the operation of connecting to your Excel file with 71 tabs. This can happen when the amount of data being processed exceeds the available memory on your computer12.

Here are a few steps you can take to resolve this issue:

Close Other Applications: Ensure that no other memory-intensive applications are running on your computer. This can free up more memory for Power BI.

Increase Virtual Memory: You can increase the virtual memory (paging file) on your computer. This can help manage larger datasets.

Optimize Your Excel File: Try to reduce the size of your Excel file by removing unnecessary data or splitting it into smaller files.

Use Power BI Dataflows: Instead of loading all the data directly into Power BI Desktop, consider using Power BI Dataflows to preprocess and store the data in the cloud.

Adjust Power BI Settings: You can adjust the data cache management settings in Power BI Desktop to allocate more memory for data processing.

Upgrade Hardware: If possible, consider upgrading your computer's RAM to handle larger datasets more efficiently.

If these steps don't resolve the issue, you might want to consider breaking down the data into smaller chunks and loading them incrementally into Power BI.


Kind regards

Jens Bonde
Microsoft Office Specialist Trainer

Tel: 0207 987 3777
STL - https://www.stl-training.co.uk
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