Bad allocation ; etc.

[ptoye]

Resetting the user profile didn't help for me. I'll try the sheet names (which have spaces). Was it the sheet in the original workbook or the linked workbook which had the spaces? Thanks for the idea (how on earth did you find it out?).

[no2ms2007]

My problem was linked sheets solely within a single workbook (ie no linked worksbook involved). You might as well try all of them. The only reason I tried it was that I'd been working wth a website editor that got very upset about spaces so I thought it was worth a go. Good luck.

[ptoye]

Sorry I missed that bit. I'll try it sometime when I have the time. But it's odd that other people don't get this problem, which makes it impossible to report as a bug.

[Ted X Asperay]

Yes I am also getting Calc crashes in these circumstances, with Windows 7 : both "bad allocation errors" and "vector too long errors" when I try to reference a cell in another sheet in the same workbook. Usually i can get it to work after recovery, but now it crashes every time I try to do this, in a particular instance. Could it be OO can't handle the long trail back of dependencies?
Using version 4.1.0 version 4.00.9764.500 for windows 7 (X86) That seems to be up to date. That's using Windows 7 SP1 on 64-bit 3GB ram, bang up to date.
This is very upsetting owing to the urgency of what I happen to be doing. It's a largish workbook with many sheets, and no doubt a great deal of inter-dependency.
Wondering what to do next.

[RusselB]

Working with a large number of different spreadsheets that are interlinked can cause a large amount of data processing that you might not realize is happening.
Can you combine the different spreadsheets into one sheet with each spreadsheet being a different sheet/page of the single spreadsheet?
If you can, and you'll need to redo the links as they will be different, then give that a try.
You state that it's a "largish workbook with many sheets".. so I have to wonder how many sheets and rows/columns per sheet (the more exact the numbers the better, but a rough idea might be sufficient)
Can you give us an example of a "long trail back of dependencies"?

I'm also wondering, if your spreadsheet(s) are that complicated, if you might not be smarter to consider learning how to make/use the database (Base)

[Ted X Asperay]

Thanks for your comments Russel. Everything's all in a single workbook with quite a few pages. It's accounts that are fairly self contained within each single year, but there are several years and balances are brought forward to the next year. So far there forty tabs in this Spreadsheet. There are also report sheets which draw on data from several sheets(tabs). Sheets may have various sub calculations and cross references within them, but not like a complex scientific or mathematical spreadsheet.
I know there is a limit to what you can put in these, particularly in the number of rows and columns but i don't think I should have reached this yet, as I reached such limits in the past, and this type of error has not been the symptom. The largest number of columns is 64 and the largest number of rows is only about 140. But being accounts, and really quite small as accounts go, these are not as complex as a scientific spreadsheet for example, and I think there's plenty enough power in this machine to handle that.
I removed any images , though not any overlaying text boxes,that were in there, but that made no difference.
Then I went into Safe Mode to enter the data, following one of the suggestions made, and that was successful. On restarting, the new entries are operating fine. Clearly the problem lies in something that is running and conflicting with the process of entry (or possibly,I guess, hogging memory). The problem still arises when there are no other Applications running (in that list) though there's obviously a lot of "Processes" and "Services" running, many of which I don't know what they are. I do however attempt to reduce Startups to the absolute minimum, and have security akin to Fort Knox.
These issues only started with the last two versions of Open Office I think.
I have another spreadsheet that got so bad in this respect I've had to abandon it. That particular one started life in Excel. I don't think this one did, though it might have, as it started 4 years ago.
Safe Mode provides some respite, but clearly that can't go on.

[acknak]

Have you tried a fresh OO settings profile?

That ought to be close to #1 remedy when OO was working file, then suddenly starts acting up.

Link: [Tutorial] The OOo user profile

[Ted X Asperay]

user profile settings..that'll take some study, and some time...when I've got some...don't want to make things worse!

[By the way, I don't know why it's got OO 3.3 for Win7 written below this box- I'm on OO 4.1.0 , using Win 7 (64bit)

[acknak]

user profile settings..that'll take some study ...

It's not as bad as it might seem. All it boils down to is renaming one folder and re-starting OO.

By the way, I don't know why it's got OO 3.3 for Win7 written below this box- I'm on OO 4.1.0 , using Win 7 (64bit)

See: How to update your software information signature

[Ted X Asperay]

Put like that, I'll give it a try!

[Ted X Asperay]

Changing Profiles: Nice try, but I seem to have two Open Office Folders in the AppData/Roaming folder, not one. One contains 3/User and the later one contains 4/User. I wonder if this is part of the problem? I only have one version of Open Office. What to do about these two? I hesitate simply to delete the older one.

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" -Some smartarse.

[thomasjk]

If you are only running AOO V4.x then delete or rename the 4/user folder.

[Ted X Asperay]

Ok. What do I do with the (redundant?) folder "OpenOffice.org" that contains the 3/user folder? (the one that contains the 4/user is called OpenOffice).

[RoryOF]

If OpenOffice 3 is uninstalled, you can remove the 3 folder.

[Ted X Asperay]

Perhaps I should have removed that before changing the profile, because I allowed OO to reuse what I assume are the profile settings from OO3. So far the remedy has not worked , as a try-out shows I am getting the "Vector too long" error message. Remove the OpenOffice.org/3 folder , then try it all again?

[ptoye]

Have you tried going back to version 4.0? Worked for me. Sorry about the late reply - been away.

[Ted X Asperay]

I think I got some of these issues with the previous version

[ptoye]

Oh well. Do your linked sheets have spaces in the names? That seemed to give problems to no2ms2007 in this topic. But I expect you've already been there.

[Ted X Asperay]

No, seems I hadn't noticed the previous page. Almost every one of the 40 tabs has spaces, so, I'll be back. I'd also consider reversion to 4.0.1 as a last resort, though nervous about that, as it might set up a new set of issues - I've done quite a bit since updating (presumably one uninstalls OO4.1.0 , then installs the old version.

[ptoye]

I'd doubt if the differences between 4.0 and 4.1 were enough to make reversion an issue. It might be worth while looking at the release notes for 4.1 to see if any of the new features are likely to affect you, though.

I think you're right about how to revert - there may be more advice here or on another board (e.g. Installation, setup & troubleshooting). All I remember is that it didn't give me any problems. Good luck.

[RoryOF]

Old computer hands avoid spaces in names/paths instinctively; as a general rule we either replace the space by "_" or use CamelCase

[ptoye]

Fair enough. But spreadsheets aren't meant to be used only by experienced computer hands.

[RoryOF]

With respect, when you drive a car you must learn the Rules of the Road. I don't see that complex software is much different.

[ptoye]

With equal respect, if the documentation says that spaces are allowed in sheet names, it is not good to write code which introduces bugs when they're used (or at least not to test it). Having said that, I am well aware of the difficulties in testing every single program path.

Non-use of spaces is not a Rule, but a Convention which grew out of programming practice. Spreadsheet users are not programmers in general. If the Rules say that spaces are allowed, this is a program bug. If the Rules are silent, it is unreasonable to expect non-programmers to know the Convention, and an error message should be produced at the time that an illegal sheet name is typed in.

[acknak]

There are some open bug reports for spaces in sheet names, but as far as I can see, they're all specific to import/export of foreign file formats.

A bug giving allocation errors with any reference to a space-containing sheet name would surely have been reported by now--it would break many, many sheets. I Don't see a problem testing it myself, but I suppose that's not proof there is no such problem in some specific circumstance.

[Ted X Asperay]

OK, I have now done the following:-
Deleted the redundant OpenOffice.org folder (/3), renamed the current 4/user folder again and restarted . NO CHANGE
Renamed every tab to eliminate spaces, though not the overall file name. STILL Vector T too long or Bad Allocation errors.
[On the above debate, I'm well aware that file & other names used not to contain spaces - been using PCs since before Windows was invented. Windows later versions changed all that quite a long time ago, and I never had this problem before. There's 2 issues here (1) solving the immediate problem (2) correcting the obvious bug in OO4.1 "Foreign" file formats? - well, I might have converted this from Excel97 but no more than that.]
I also set about the thankless task of finding out which process or service is causing the conflict. I identified about 9 processes of the 33 processes and 170 services(half not running) which I could recognise as safe to stop temporarily within my limited knowledge . This included , after disconnecting from internet, various various security software . Outcome: STILL Bad Allocation errors or vector too long.
It remains to only to try reverting to OO4.0.1 (or 4.0.0. for good measure?) , but I guess I'd have to look elsewhere to appreciate any pitfalls. So in no hurry as I would anticipate a host of new issues, as I've been using 4.1.0 for 3 months. Resigned to muddling along with judicious use of Safe Mode in the meantime. Not about to abandon Open Office!

I suppose it is possible that all the complainants have got corrupt registries or something, but that's looking unlikely.

[acknak]

If you're this invested in moving forward, you may want to try installing the current snapshot build of the next release, 4.1.1, to see if the problem may go away with the next release.

Hmm ... I see now that the development releases are up to the "RC" (Release Candidate) stage, so it should be just a few days until the final release of 4.1.1.

If your issue does not resolve with an update, then it should really be tracked down; the first thing to check is whether the sheet causes the problem on another system. If it does, then that's a good indicator that there's a bug that can be addressed. If you can attach the sheet here, that's easy. If you can't maybe you can share it privately with someone for testing.

[commentator]

Running OO 4.1.0 on Windows 8.1 on a brand new Dell XPS12 Touch Screen Convertible Tablet. Was previously running same OO ver. on Compaq Presario SR1610NX desktop with Windows XP Service Pack 2 and getting the same problem: Frequent "bad allocation" error message causing OO to completely shut down.

I am getting this every day, usually multiple times per day. It seems unrelated to anything in particular. Sometimes occurs after 10 minutes of work, sometimes after an hour or three, sometimes after files sit open overnight upon first use in the morning.

I normally have open one to three text files and one to four calc files simultaneously; however, this problem even occurs when I have only two or three files open. I am not sure if it occurs with only one file open.

I don't know if this is the correct place to post this problem and I didn't read through all the thread; I'm brand new here so I apologize if this is not the right way to do it.

Any ideas? Responses?

[RoryOF]

Try starting Windows in Safe mode and running OpenOffice in that mode - it may be slow. If it is stable in that mode the problem is almost certainly caused by a program or windows driver that runs in Windows full mode.

[Ted X Asperay]

I have now installed the latest AOO 4-1-1. Pleased to say that so far the particular issue, of crashing when entering reference cells from another tab , appears to have disappeared - from a limited test anyway.
Quite unexpected, considering this bug is not listed in the bug fixes.
I was also experiencing occasional undefinable "bad allocation" crashes: Haven't had another one so far, though haven't put it all through its paces quite yet.