The STEM Editor provides a mechanism to retrieve data from any database which supports the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) standard. This mechanism uses
external references, strings of text used in a formula to identify the required data. The form of an external reference is '<filename>'!<reference>. The <filename> is enclosed in single quotes to prevent special characters being mis-interpreted as another part of a formula. The format of the <reference> depends on the type of external file or source.
For a database, the <reference> will be interpreted as the name of a database table or query, or as an explicit Structured Query Language (SQL) query.