Works 6: Unexpected Results When You Copy a Large Spreadsheet to Excel

If you drag or copy and paste a very large Microsoft Works Spreadsheet document (greater than 1 megabyte [MB] in size) to a Microsoft Excel worksheet, you may experience one or more of the following symptoms:

• Several minutes are required for the process to be completed, during which time your computer seems to stop responding (hang).
• Excel and Works stop responding.
• Microsoft Windows stops responding.
• Excel stops responding when you attempt to quit the program.

You do not experience similar symptoms when you copy and paste the same document to Microsoft WordPad or to another instance of Works Spreadsheet.

This behavior can occur if your computer is running low on system resources during the data conversion process.

To work around this issue, follow these steps:

1. In the Works Spreadsheet document, select only part of the data that you want to copy and paste into the Excel worksheet.
2. Start Excel, and then open the Excel worksheet.
3. Drag or copy and paste the data into the Excel worksheet.
4. Repeat steps 1 and 2 until all of the data that you want to copy and paste is in the Excel worksheet.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.