Circular reference that can't be shown

I have a worksheet with a whole lot of formula's in it, about 4000 I think (including conditional formatting). I sent it to a colleague and they said that an error showed. I re-opened it and was served with the following error (in Dutch):

Er kan geen formule worden berekend door Microsoft Excel. Er is een kringverwijzing aanwezig in een geopende werkmap, maar de verwijzingen van de kring kunnen niet worden weergegeven. U kunt proberen de laatste formule die u hebt ingevoerd te bewerken of deze te verwijderen met de opdracht Ongedaan maken.

Which roughly translates to:

Excel can't calculate a formula because of a circular reference, but it can't be shown.

Now I could ofcourse trim the worksheet piece by piece to narrow down where the circular reference is located. But is there a more efficient way? The built-in circular reference finder is grayed out, so that is not an option. Installing third party tools is also not an option due to strict software control by the IT department.

Solution 1:

The solution here was to enable limited iterative calculation in menu File > Options > Formulas, where in the section "Calculation options" is set:

• Check "Enable iterative calculation"
• Set "Maximum iterations:" to 1
• Click OK.

With this setting, cyclic formulas were now checked. Setting the maximum to 1 stopped the check for circular calculations after only one calculation.