Memory in Excel 98 (Mac)

I’m running Excel from Office 98, on a G4 Mac with 1G of memory, in OS 9.2. There’s a 5.6M file that I use every day, and I’ve started getting out-of-memory alerts when doing sorts. I have to quit the application and re-open the file, then it’s fine for a while, except that sorts take longer than they used to. I’ve raised the Excel memory to 50M, and it’s still happening.

Am I approaching a maximum file size for this version of Excel? Would an upgrade solve the problem? (I haven’t upgraded, because I don’t need any of the new features, but I will if it’ll solve this problem.)

MacOS 9 doesn’t allocate RAM dynamically.

Find Excel itself in the Finder (with Excel NOT running). Do Command-I for “Get Info”. Click the dropdown valuelist, if it isn’t already ON “memory”, and go to “memory” and you’ll see how much RAM is allocated to Excel each time Excel is launched. Up it to a higher number. You’ve got a gig to play with but not every Mac user of Office 98 does, so the default allocation is probably low.

Oops! I see you’ve already raised the memory for Excel.

Hmm, I don’t know then.