'there are too many records to complete this operation' Excel Pivot Table Refresh

Question

Does anyone have a resource that gives possible reasons for this error message in Excel. I've googled around and looks like lots of people encounter the message but no one replies with concrete suggestions for resolving.

The actual source of data is an Excel list and is only 1000 rows long and a few users use this pivot table and refresh successfully only a couple encounter this error message when refreshing the exact same spreadsheet. They do not refresh at same time.

Answer 1

For me the solution was to get rid of a Calculated item. I think they complicate the pivot and it doesn't work even if the amount of records doesn't seem like much.

Answer 2

I hope this will resolve your issues as I've just encountered the same problem and was looking for a solution. I've discovered that the cause of this problem is that I've formulas encoded in some of the excel cells which I did the pivot. I simply copy all the data (about 58,000 rows of records,>100 columns of data, that's quite substantial) into another worksheet by pasting all data with 'Values'. Do a fresh pivot on this new worksheet and bravo! I don't have anymore of the errors which I encountered earlier. Mine you, I've lots of fields in this pivoted table and I don't get anymore errors. Check carefully if you've any formulas built-in your excel worksheet before you do the pivot. Hope the above helps.

Answer 3

I had this similar problem, but this problem cropped up after I inserted a new "non formula" column into the the base data. All other columns got inserted into the pivot table except this new column. Also, my base data had many formula driven columns & also "#N/A" values too :-) After lot of googling & trying out converting formulas in any other column to values, this issue did not get solved - However, since there was no problems of other columns getting accepted into Pivot table, I finally figured out that the new column had an "apostrophe" in the "column header" - I removed that "apostrophe" from that new column (& older columns did not had that apostrophe" , this error of "there are too many records to complete this operation" got solved :-)