What is a circular reference in Excel?

Circular references are one of those things that breaks your formulas and makes Excel stop calculating. If you ever get a circular reference, you need to fix it immediately.

In Excel a circular reference is when you have a formula on Excel that loops back on itself, so there's no result. You generate one result, then the next cell takes that result and feeds it back into the first cell. So if you try to solve it, you get an endless loop. You’ll be jumping from one cell to the other one and back, and will never reach a result.

If there’s one thing Excel needs, it’s to arrive at a final result for formula that you enter. The formula has to have a start, and an end. It can’t just go on forever.

A circular reference is a common error that you see a lot of times when you're just starting out and trying to do formulas. Or when you're doing really complex spreadsheets and don’t set your references correctly. You can easily end up with circular references, and you’ll get an error message.