Sample select one external form shows text box instead of choice list

1. What is the problem? Be very detailed.
I made a XLS form that uses a select_one_external question type, with a separate sheet named 'external_choices' as shown in the docs here https://xlsform.org/en/#external-selects . However, none of the options in the external_choices sheet are actually displayed when I preview the form on ODK Central .
Instead I just see text boxes where I expect to see a multiple choice 'select_one'

2. What app or server are you using and on what device and operating system? Include version numbers.
Uploading my XLS form to ODK Central v 1.0.3 on Digital Ocean.
Using the preview form feature to test out the form

3. What you have you tried to fix the problem?
I tried to troubleshoot this, double checked syntax, w/o success, but eventually wound up uploading the sample form referenced in the docs and it gives the same error when I preview it.

4. What steps can we take to reproduce the problem?
Upload the sample form to an instance of ODK Central

5. Anything else we should know or have? If you have a test form or screenshots or logs, attach below.
Screenshot attached for the sample form

Please take a careful look at the first paragraph in the documentation you linked to. This feature is only supported in ODK Collect and not in web forms (Enketo). How many choices do you have? Did you try building the form without external selects?

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Ah ok, understood! sorry I missed that..
I do intend to deploy the form using ODK Collect
The web forms were just to preview the choice lists.

I have about 350 choices in cascading selects.. it could without external selects I guess but I want the option of adding new choices later, by simply replacing itemsets.csv

thanks @LN !

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