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 Ctrl+Shift+I 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.