Excel – Unable to insert rows or columns in Excel 2013

I'm using Office 2013 on Windows 7. Few times, I have not been able to insert rows / columns in a some of the Excel spreadsheets. I tried the following before searching on the internet.

1. Use right-click on the column border to select "Insert" option – the
   option is not grayed out – but it does no action – no rows/columns inserted
2. Click on the "Insert" icon (which is under the "Cells" group of the
   "Home" tab) – select the "Insert sheet rows / Insert sheet columns"
   option from the sub-menu – nothing happens
3. Tried using a keyboard shortcut
   Ctrl+Shift++ to add rows / columns
   after selecting a particular column or row – no rows/columns
   inserted.

When I googled, I found lot of search results pointing to the error What does 'To prevent possible loss of data, Excel cannot shift nonblank cells off of the worksheet" mean? But I'm not getting any such error message when I attempt the insertion of row / column.
There are no patterns of files for which this row/column insert operation fails. Sometimes, it happens to a file on a network server or sometimes to the files on my PC.

The present workaround is to restart Excel and most times it allows row/column insertion on the same file. Has anyone come across similar issues? Any fixes found so far?