Is circular reference useful?

[Mangolili]

Does anyone know the uses of circular reference? Does it help working in excel? Please let me know. Thanks.

 

[CWatts]

It's a perpeutally infinite loop so I can't see any use. If anything excel's circular reference error checking saves us from crashing by protecting us from making infiniate loops.

 

[T. Valko]

Does anyone know the uses of circular reference? Does it help working in excel? Please let me know. Thanks.

A very useful application of a circular reference is entering date/time stamps.

http://www.mcgimpsey.com/excel/timestamp.html

 

[taurean]

Circular reference is a result of erroneous formula. So it does indicate you have made a mistake.

I'd like to know as well.

 

[Smitty]

You can also use Circular References for Iteration:

http://www.decisionmodels.com/calcsecretsk.htm

HTH,

 

[CWatts]

So that explains why they have the "MrExcel MVP" title.

Learn something new every day. Thanks gents!

 

[Mangolili]

Thank you so much, everyone. Appreciate your ideas and resources

 

[pgc01]

Hi

I posted some time ago an example for the calculation of a factorial using a circular reference.

This is a simple example just to understand the mechanisms of how to initialise variables, trigger the calculation and stop when done.

Notice that some of the methods you use in real life are iterative and this shows that if you want you can implement them directly in the worksheet without vba. An example is using the Newton–Raphson method to find the roots of an equation.

Hope this contributes to understanding that circular references can be used intentionally to solve a problem.

http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/showthread.php?t=492804#11

 

[Mangolili]

Thank you so much. But I couldn't find the post you wrote, I saw others' replies in that link.

 

[pgc01]

Thank you so much. But I couldn't find the post you wrote, I saw others' replies in that link.

Sorry, you are right. Try instead:

http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/showthread.php?p=2432844