5. External references
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## 5. External references

Instead of typing product descriptions, we are going to use a formula to fetch them from an external XML document. This document is ``XXE_install_dir`/doc/spreadsheet/tutorial/products.html`.

Click in cell C2 and use Tools → Spreadsheet → Insert/Edit Formula to insert a new formula. Enter this multi-line formula:

    location = "products.html#" & trim(B2) & "_desc"
    =`document($location, .)`

First line is easy to understand. It assigns to local variable `location` a string built using the code of the product: "`products.html#xe-1u_desc`". "`product.html`" is the URL, relative to the location of the document being edited, of the external XML document containing product descriptions. "`xe-1u_desc`" is the ID of the element containing the description of product `xe-1u`.

Second line contains an XPath escape. The expression between backquotes '`' , which uses standard XPath function document(), allows to fetch a node found in an external document. Without the "`#xe-1u_desc`" fragment identifier, the whole document node is fetched. With the "`#xe-1u_desc`" fragment identifier, we fetch the element node having `xe-1u_desc` as its ID.

Copy the new formula to the clipboard (Ctrl+C) and paste it (Ctrl+V) into C3, C4, C5.

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