There have been ample
articles about troubleshooting unintentional circular references in Excel workbooks. This post focuses on the opposite: choosing to
deliberately work with circular references.
Circular references aren't a bad thing in itself: you can use them to achieve complex calculations that are otherwise impossible to do, but first you must set them up properly.
Circular references can be useful in situations such as the following:
- If you want to perform a calculation for which you need the last result to be a new input value for the calculation. For example, you are creating a calculation model of a chemical facility where (part of) an input stream of a process is a recycled output stream of the same process.
- If you want a cell to remember the date at which an entry was made into another cell.
