First post so please be gently.

I have a customer who is experiencing issues with a particular process in
Excel 2007 and I wanted to seek clarification on what its doing.

They are importing data from a SQL table, approximately 90 columns by 2000
rows. They filter the data and then copy the data and paste to another sheet
in the same workbook. They then delete 78 of the 90 columns. At this point,
they get "Excel cannot complete this task with available resources" message.
Looking in Task Manager, memory usage for Excel has increased from around
70mb to over 1gb.

can anyone advise why the memory usage increases by so much for doing
something that actually reduces the amount of data in the sheet. I am
wondering whether its to do with the filtering.