Charles is as expert as you're going to find wrt this stuff:-

http://www.decisionmodels.com/memlimitsc.htm

But, I'll give you one piece of advice that I'm sure isn't necessary as you
will already have done it:-

BACK IT UP NOW!!!!

You are certainly pushing the limits wrt what most of us would generally
consider a manageable size for a spreadsheet. You don't say what is in your
workbook, but 100MB is a lot of data to lose if it goes wrong. I work with
a number of Pivot tables that are based on circa 40-50K rows of data by
around 40 columns of data. These tend to fall out at around 45/50 MB or
thereabouts, so I guess I'm curious to know what's driving the 100MB size?

--
Regards
Ken....................... Microsoft MVP - Excel
Sys Spec - Win XP Pro / XL 97/00/02/03

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It's easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission :-)
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"Rebecca" wrote in message
...
Hi. I am using Excel 2003 on a laptop with 512 RAM and 1.2 Ghz CPU. I
have
one xls file that is now close to 100 megabytes. It opens very slowly,
but
seems to work well once opened. I was wondering if I am pushing the
limits
with such a large file. Could some of the experts in this forum please
tell
me at what point files become too large to handle? Than