Excel 32-bit or 64-bit?

[Vivek D]

I am working with fairly large datasets and have frequently run into memory issues on my current laptop (6GB RAM but 32-bit office).

I am thinking of installing 64-bit version of Office and upgrading RAM too.

However, if I create reports/dashboards using slicers, VBA, PowerPivot,Power Query in a 64-bit version of Excel will users that use the report (mostly folks with 32-bit version installed) be able to use it without any problem?

Are there any other considerations/problems with installing 64-bit version?

 

[Chihiro]

Don't go 64-bit Office, unless there's very compelling reason to do so. You will experience more compatibility issue than not (it's not recommended by MS and not a default option for a reason).

See link for some of more well known issues.
http://kb.mit.edu/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=11337928

 

[Vivek D]

Thanks. A 32-bit version of excel only uses a max of 2GB per instance right? I have been frequently running into errors saying I don't have enough memory though I'm wondering if it's an Excel issue or some other issue with my laptop.
The excel files I'm dealing with are around 100MB so don't know why this is happening.

 

[Chihiro]

That'd be right. 32-bit Windows application is limited to 2GB memory.

Run process monitor on your laptop and see what process are running beside Excel and see if during your process if 6GB memory limit is reached.

Also, 2GB limit is shared by Excel process and any add-in that runs on same process. If there are Excel add-ins that's not needed, you may want to disable it when working on larger files.