From the course: Excel Tips Weekly

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Dealing with circular errors

Dealing with circular errors - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Excel Tips Weekly

Dealing with circular errors

- [Voiceover] From time to time working with Excel formulas, you might encounter what's called a circular reference. On this worksheet we've got 46 locations in our operation. We've just added five new ones, and suppose I write a formula to increment this by five, and I'm thinking, okay A nine plus five. Either I'm inattentive or I'm just not sure what's going on. I'm going to type in equal A nine plus five, but if I do it in the same cell I'm envisioning maybe the answer 51, but Excel can't really do this. It's saying this five is added to the current value of A nine, that's what you might be thinking. Press enter, a message, "There are one or more circular references or a formula refers to its own cell." Click okay, what happens here? We get a zero, and at the bottom of the screen we see circular reference in cell A nine, and here's that formula, and that just won't work, we can't do that. Now what I'll do here of course is press escape and control Z. Perhaps write the…

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