MS-Help does not give this solution.
How to find and locate circular reference in Excel quickly?
When you apply a formula in a cell, says Cell C1, and the formula refers back to its own cell directly or indirectly, says =Sum (A1:C1), circular reference happens.
When you reopen this workbook with circular reference again, it pops up a circular reference error message, which warns formulas contains a circular reference and may not calculate correctly. See the following screenshot:
It tells what is the problem, however, it does not say where the error stays in. If you click the OK button, the warning error message will be closed, but it will pop up next time when you reopen the workbook; if you click the Help button, it will bring you to the Help document.
Find out and locate the cell in Status bar
Find out and locate the cell in Circular Reference
Find out and locate the cell in Status bar
You can find the circular reference in the Status bar.
Compare two ranges and select and highlight the same or different values in Excel
|
In Excel, if there are two tables in a sheet or two sheets needed to be compared, generally, you will compare one row by one manually. But if you have Kutools for Excel's Select Same & Different Cells utility, you can quickly find the same rows or different rows, and, also, you can highlight them with background color or font color as you need. Free trial for full-featured 30-days! |
![]() |
Kutools for Excel: with more than 300 handy Excel add-ins, free to try with no limitation in 30 days. |
Find out and locate the cell in Circular Reference
Actually, you can find out and locate the cell with circular reference in Excel with following steps:
Step 1: Go to the Formula Auditing group under the Formula tab.
Step 2: Click the Arrow button besides the Error Checking button.
Step 3: Move mouse over the Circular References item in the drop down list, and it shows the cells with circular references. See the following screenshot:
Step 4: Click the cell address listed besides the Circular References, it selects the cell with circular reference at once.
The Best Office Productivity Tools
Kutools for Excel Solves Most of Your Problems, and Increases Your Productivity by 80%
- Reuse: Quickly insert complex formulas, charts and anything that you have used before; Encrypt Cells with password; Create Mailing List and send emails...
- Super Formula Bar (easily edit multiple lines of text and formula); Reading Layout (easily read and edit large numbers of cells); Paste to Filtered Range...
- Merge Cells/Rows/Columns without losing Data; Split Cells Content; Combine Duplicate Rows/Columns... Prevent Duplicate Cells; Compare Ranges...
- Select Duplicate or Unique Rows; Select Blank Rows (all cells are empty); Super Find and Fuzzy Find in Many Workbooks; Random Select...
- Exact Copy Multiple Cells without changing formula reference; Auto Create References to Multiple Sheets; Insert Bullets, Check Boxes and more...
- Extract Text, Add Text, Remove by Position, Remove Space; Create and Print Paging Subtotals; Convert Between Cells Content and Comments...
- Super Filter (save and apply filter schemes to other sheets); Advanced Sort by month/week/day, frequency and more; Special Filter by bold, italic...
- Combine Workbooks and WorkSheets; Merge Tables based on key columns; Split Data into Multiple Sheets; Batch Convert xls, xlsx and PDF...
- More than 300 powerful features. Supports Office/Excel 2007-2019 and 365. Supports all languages. Easy deploying in your enterprise or organization. Full features 30-day free trial. 60-day money back guarantee.

Office Tab Brings Tabbed interface to Office, and Make Your Work Much Easier
- Enable tabbed editing and reading in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Access, Visio and Project.
- Open and create multiple documents in new tabs of the same window, rather than in new windows.
- Increases your productivity by 50%, and reduces hundreds of mouse clicks for you every day!
