Excel 2011 crashes when I work on a large Excel file I have a MacBook Pro running on Mavericks with 8GB of RAM.

I am using a large Excel file with roughly 250k rows of data (170MB). I would like to delete several sheets in the file but every time I do, Excel freezes and I have to force the application to quit. I am extremely limited in what I can do with this file.

This is being a huge problem for me as this file contains data for my research. What would you advise me to do?
According to this Excel Specifications, it is not the file size, and it is only limited by available memory.

I would suggest you run the Error check in Excel, to find out the errors in you spread sheet that might be causing the lock up.