XL2000: "The Disk Is Full" Error Copying Very Large Worksheet

In Microsoft Excel, if you copy a worksheet, Microsoft Excel may appear to stop responding. If you wait, the following error message appears: and the worksheet is not copied.

This problem may occur if the following conditions are true:

• The worksheet you are copying contains a very large amount of information (over a million cells, for example).
  
  -and-
• You are running Microsoft Excel under Microsoft Windows 95, Microsoft Windows 98, or Microsoft Windows 2000.

NOTE: The problem does not occur when you run Microsoft Excel under Microsoft Windows NT. The problem also does not occur when you move a worksheet.

If this problem occurs, you can still copy the contents of the worksheet, and then paste them into a new worksheet. To select the entire worksheet, press CTRL+A, CTRL+SHIFT+SPACE, or click Select All in the upper-left corner of the worksheet.

Note that if you use this method to create a copy of a worksheet, some elements of the worksheet may not be copied, including:

• Defined names
• Macros assigned to the worksheet

You may need to manually recreate these items or copy them from the original worksheet. Note that charts copied from one worksheet to another may still refer to the original worksheet. To correct the references in a chart, click the chart and on the Chart menu, click Source Data. Change the reference in the Data range box to the new location.

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the versions of Microsoft Excel listed at the beginning of this article.