- How To Turn Off Circular Reference In Excel For Mac Shortcut
- How To Turn Off Circular Reference In Excel For Macbook Pro
- How To Allow Circular Reference In Excel Mac
What is a circular reference? A circular reference is when a cell refers to itself directly or indirectly. Are circular references bad? In most cases, a circular reference should and can be avoided with some planning. However, in a complex financial, I found it easier to just use circular references in certain areas. Circular References Continue reading 'Circular References in Financial. A circular reference occurs when a cell in an Excel 2010 worksheet refers to itself, whether directly or indirectly. For example, if =100+A2 is entered into cell A2, then a direct circular reference has been created. An indirect circular reference is when the formula in a given cell refers to one or more other cells that in return refer back to the original cell. If you're using Excel 2010 or later, click File Options Formulas. If you're using Excel for Mac, click the Excel menu, and then click Preferences Calculation. If you're using Excel 2007, click the Microsoft Office Button, click Excel Options, and then click the Formulas category. Further, Excel sometimes puts itself in a state where it can’t resolve the circular reference. The solution is to temporarily disable the formulas and then enable them again once the formulas work. However, tracking down all of the tendrils of a circular reference was always tricky for me until I discovered a hidden feature in Excel.
Millions of people using Excel don’t get why they see the “circular reference” error message right after they’ve entered a formula. The message means that your formula is trying to calculate its own cell–kind of like when a dog chases its own tail.
Because so many of you search on “circular reference,” we thought we should very clearly explain how to remove or fix your formula in Excel Help on Office.com.
Here’s one tip. Sometimes the first step in resolving the issue is figuring out which cell contains the wayward formula–not an easy task when a worksheet can contain dozens of them. Because there can be so many, Excel has a built-in sleuth to help you find it. Just look for the Error Checking option on the Formula tab.
The Office.com article “Remove or allow a circular reference” shows you how to use the Circular References option, and other tips and trick for figuring out how to make that error message go away.
In Excel, you typically type in formulas to get results and it’s pretty common to reference other cells in the process. However, what happens if you reference the cell itself, either directly or indirectly? This means an infinite loop of calculations! Luckily, Excel has solutions to deal with these kinds of situations.
How To Turn Off Circular Reference In Excel For Mac Shortcut
Circular Reference means that your formula is trying to calculate the origin cell. Typically, this is considered an error. However, there are times where this error can actually be useful and you might to want to create a circular reference on purpose. Let’s take a closer look at this phenomenon with some examples. You can download the sample workbook here.
Direct Reference
If you go to the cell C3, for example, and then type in “=C3”, you would confuse Excel a bit because this is cell is now pointing to itself, thus creating a circular reference. Doing the same thing inside a formula will also have the same effect (i.e. =IF(C3,…,…) or =C3+10).
Another common example is including the original cell when selecting a range from adjacent cells. For example, including the cell C4 in the sum formula =SUM(C2:C4) will transform this into a circular reference.
Indirect Reference
A cell that is targeting a cell that is pointing to the originating cell will create an indirect reference. In other words, circular reference can be established by two cells targeting each other. For example, entering “=D3” into cell B3, while cell D3 contain a reference from B3 cell (“=B3” in this case).
Why is this a problem?
Excel warns the user when there’s an occurrence of a circular reference, because a circular reference essentially means endless loops. Telling Excel to repeat the same calculation over and over for an infinite number of times doesn’t make too much sense. To prevent freezing your computer, Excel simply ignores circular references.
Let’s take a look at this warning message. You’ll get the following message after typing in a circular referenced formula,
Note that Excel doesn’t give the same error for additional circular formula references. On Excel’s status bar, the latest cell with a circular reference will be shown. This means that there might be more than one such reference on this tab. Here is what it looks like,
Excel also keeps a list of all circular references, which can be accessed from Error Checking option on the Formula tab,
How to get rid of them
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to remove or fix unwanted circular references. You’re going to need to use one of the ways mentioned before and resolve them one by one. To find out about what’s causing the issue, you can use the Formula Auditing option under Formula tab. See our guide to learn how to do this, https://www.spreadsheetweb.com/identifying-analyzing-spreadsheets-formula-auditing/
Can they be useful?
Yes! Although, only under some circumstances. You may intentionally want to calculate a circular formula block more than few times. Excel allows this “iterative” calculation approach using limits.
To activate and use circular references you must first activate them by checking Enable iterative calculations option under the File menu.
Go to File > Options > Formulas > Calculation options in Excel 2016, Excel 2013 and Excel 2010.
In Excel 2007, you need to go to Office button > Excel options > Formulas > Iteration area
In Excel 2003 and earlier, you need to go toMenu > Tools > Options > Calculation
Enabling iterative calculations will bring up two additional inputs in the same menu,
- Maximum Iterations determines how many times Excel is to recalculate the workbook
- Maximum Change determines the maximum difference between values of iterative formulas. Note that smaller number means accurate results.
Iterative calculations stop when one of the conditions defined above are matched.
How To Turn Off Circular Reference In Excel For Macbook Pro
Use Cases
Calculating Future Value of an Investment
Let’s assume that we have $10,000 want to invest this money in a CD account. The monthly interest in this option is 1.25%. Download the sample workbook for this use case here. To calculate the total value at the end of 21st month, we’re going to calculate each month and add the interest to the previous month.
First, enter the starting money, interest, and the basic total value function,
=value * ( 1 + interest rate)
Then, select the cell with the initial cash value and add the reference of the total value function.
This move will cause a circular reference warning if iterative calculations are not enabled. If you haven’t done so already, enable this option and set Maximum Iterations to 20 to find the interest at 21st month.
Press OK.
Automatic Timestamp
Circular references can also be used to add time stamp into cells. Download the sample workbook for this use case here. Let’s assume we want to add time stamps to the orders in the table below,
We can use circular references to add a time stamp when a new order information is entered.
Start with adding a new column into table to place the timestamps in. Type in the formula, =IF(A2<>””,IF(I2<>””,I2,NOW()),””)
This formula will check whether the Order Number (cell A2) was entered. If there’s a value entered and the timestamp cell is empty, then the formula will return the NOW() function.
How To Allow Circular Reference In Excel Mac
Note that pressing the Enter button will give a circular reference warning if iterative calculations are not enabled. This time Maximum Iterations or Maximum Change numbers don’t mean much because we only need a single iteration, so you can leave these two inputs in their default values.
Now, every time we enter a new order and create a new row, an timestamp will be automatically printed on the Timestamp column.
In its essence an error, circular references can actually be useful in some cases. It’s definitely one of those features that most users haven’t even heard of. However, knowing your way around them (and with them!) can help you build more sophisticated Excel models.