Question

I am trying to copy a fairly large amount of data (~ 50,000 rows, 200 columns of doubles) from a datagridview to the clipboard. To do this I’m selecting all cells and pressing Ctrl+C, at which point I think datagridview handles the actually clipboard copying internally. The program pauses for several seconds then displays the cryptic message…

“Argument ‘Prompt’ cannot be converted to type ‘String’.”

… then the program quits.

I have copied from datagridview to clipboard tons of times in the past, but never this many cells. Regardless, I don’t believe this is an inordinate amount of data for today’s computers.

This is part of debugging a larger issue, where I’d written a routine that copies an entire datagridview to clipboard, opens a new Excel workbook, and dumps to Excel. If I run that routine for this particular datagridview, I get a System.OutofMemory exception.

Answer 1

Maybe I was too quick to say 50K rows + 200 columns was a manageable amount for the clipboard. That judgment partly came from the ability copy & paste similar amounts in Excel, but after further examination I’m not sure exactly if/when/how Excel makes use of the clipboard. So maybe I am exceeding reasonable memory demands… I’ve switched to a piecemeal approach.