Measuring Excel Memory Useage

Measuring Memory Used by Excel

If you are using Windows NT, Windows 2000 or Windows XP you can use Task Manager (accessed by Ctrl/Alt/Delete) to track the total amount of memory being used by EXCEL.EXE.

This shows the total of the memory used (working set) by Excel itself and the memory used by Excel to store data and formulae etc.

Task Manager will also show you the size and useage of your Swapfile.

You can track the amount of memory Excel is using for workbooks etc, excluding memory occupied by the Excel programs etc., using:

• The FastExcel Memory Used, Pivot Cache Memory Used and Profile Workbook commands.
• Excel’s worksheet function INFO("memused")
• Application.MemoryUsed from VBA.

INFO("MEMUSED") and Application.Memoryused are less useful with Excel 2003 because the Excel 2003 memory limit is a different kind of limit to previous versions, and these functions are not available for Excel 2007.

There are two other memory used commands available, but they are not useful:

• INFO("memavail") or Application.MemoryFree
• INFO("totmem") or Application.MemoryTotal

These are supposed to give you the amount of memory available or free, and the sum of memory used and memory available.
Unfortunately memory available or free does not work properly and always shows a constant 1 megabyte available.
Consequently total memory, which shows the sum of memory used and memory free, also does not work properly.

Measuring System Memory

You can use the GlobalMemoryStatus windows API to obtain information about system memory status, including total and used Physical RAM, Swapfile and Virtual Memory.

See MSKB article Q213267 for details and an example of this API.