What's a relative reference?

Abstract

What’s a relative reference?

A relative cell reference points to an address that is relative to the location of the reference.

When a formula is copied to a new location, relative references are automatically updated.

Relative cell references are standard in Excel.

Let’s take a look.

In this worksheet we have two highlighted cell references.

Let’s create a formula that adds them together.

We can enter =B9 + D6

We get a result of 35, as expected.

And any change to cell B9 or D6 is reflected immediately.

The cell references in this formula are relative references.

And Excel evaluates the address D6 as the cell five rows up.

Let’s copy our formula to a different cell to see relative references in action.

At the new location, we get a result of zero.

Let’s check the formula to see why that is.

We see that Excel has updated the relative references.

Both cells are empty, so we get a result of zero.

Let’s copy and paste a few more times.

In that case, we’ll get a REFERENCE error.

Excel will show a REF error whenever it can’t locate a cell reference.