Microsoft Excel is the most popular spreadsheet program in use today and is part of the Microsoft Office suite of programs that can be used on your desktop computer as well as online with the web versions of the Office apps. It is used by large corporations as well as by the average home user. Excel in general can be a complex program but when you start receiving errors when opening and working on your spreadsheets, then these can be hard to figure out.
One common problem that you may encounter when opening an Excel workbook is an error that says “There are one or more circular references where a formula refers to its own cell either directly or indirectly. This might cause them to calculate incorrectly.” This message does not give you any real details about where the problem is or how to fix it. In this article, we will be showing you how to fix the Microsoft Excel circular references formula error.
One thing you might try to see if you can find out what is causing this circular reference error is to go to the Formula tab and then in the Formula Auditing group and then choose Error Checking.
If you run the error checking in Excel, there is a good chance that it will simply say The error check is complete for the entire sheet and not give you an answer to your problem.
What you can try instead is to choose the Circular References selection from the Error Checking dropdown and it should show you what cell contains the formula with the error.
Then you can click on the cell that has the error and try and figure out what is causing it. As you can see in the image below, the formula is =SUM(B3:B17) but cell B17 contains the total for column B which should not be included in the formula. So the correct formula should be =SUM(B3:B16).
After I change the formula to the correct values, I will not get the circular reference formula error the next time I open the Excel workbook.
For additional training resources, check out our online IT training courses.
Check out our extensive IT book series.
