Populating a decision table from an Excel spreadsheet

You can copy the contents of an Excel spreadsheet into a decision table provided the structure of the Excel spreadsheet and the decision table are the same.

Procedure

To populate a decision table with the contents of an Excel spreadsheet:

  1. Define the columns of your decision table. See Defining columns.
  2. Make sure that the columns of the Excel spreadsheet correspond to the columns of your decision table.
  3. Copy the cells in the Excel spreadsheet.
  4. Right-click the first cell of the decision table, that is, the cell on row 0 in the first column, and click Paste. If you are inserting a new line and not overwriting an existing line of information, right-click and use Paste Special.

Results

Rule Designer automatically merges cells that have the same value. For example, if the content of your Excel spreadsheet is as follows:

Example content of an Excel spreadsheet

The resulting decision table looks like this:

Resulting decision table from the example content of an Excel spreadsheet

If you specify a range of values, the range is represented by two subcolumns in the decision table. For example, if you specified the following range in your Excel spreadsheet:

Example range in an Excel spreadsheet

The Surcharge column in the decision table would look like this:

Resulting Surcharge column in the decision table from the example range in an Excel spreadsheet