Transferring data to and from Excel

You can export decision tables as Excel files to work offline on their content, and import these Excel files back to the Business console with your changes. You can also manually transfer data such as rows, columns, and cells between Excel files and decision tables.

Export to Excel

To export an entire decision table from the Business console to Excel:

Select your decision table in the Decision artifact tab.
Click Download this decision table as an Excel file.

You can also click Download as Excel in the Decision Table view.

You can then share your decision table as an Excel spreadsheet for reviewing or reporting purposes.

If you have several decision tables in a project, you can download them as a single Excel spreadsheet. In the Decision artifact tab, select the check boxes next to your decision tables, then click Download the selected decision tables... in the toolbar. Your tables are exported in one file, with a table per sheet.

When you generate the Excel file, condition cells are merged. If you primarily want to generate the file to edit it and then paste the modifications into the Business console, you should deactivate condition cell merging. Set the decisioncenter.web.dt.excelExport.mergeConditionCells preference to false.

Operators are exported in the Excel cell value, for example, >, [], +, and is null.

Import from Excel

To import your Excel file back in the Business console:

Open the decision table editor.
Click Import Excel File.
Select your Excel spreadsheet.
Click Import.

You cannot change the structure of the decision table before you import it in the Business console. For example, you cannot add columns, which would introduce a new condition or action, or edit definitions comments in column headers. You can modify only values, or add and remove rows. Importing a table with an altered structure might cause errors or unexpected behavior. You can always undo unwanted changes with the Undo button.

Formatting in Excel

If you are making modifications in Excel to re-import the file back into the Business console, you must write operators manually and without Excel formatting, for example:

Operators on numbers and dates, such as:
```
[10 | 20]
>50
[01/01/2019 | 02/05/2019[
```
Operators on strings, such as contains, starts with, ends with
Operators on sets, such as in X, Y, !in X, Y
Operators without parameters, such as is null, is not null, is empty, is not empty

New in 8.10.3 Values are exported as you see them when you right click a cell, for example:

Simple dates: M/D/Y
Dates: M/D/Y H:MM:SS AM/PM
Universal dates: M/D/Y H:MM/SS AM/PM

Calls to user defined methods are supported when you export and import the decision table. The generated Excel file displays the full expression, which is underlined. When you import the file back into the Business console, underlined text is interpreted as a call to a BOM method.

Transfer data manually

You can also transfer data between Excel and decision tables by copying and pasting the elements. When copying from Excel to the Business console, the content that you select must match the content of the decision table. If the contents of a transfer does not match the contents of the decision table, the decision table editor can block the transfer or show an error.

Moving information between the two environments can alter data. You can transfer only values and not data type information. For example, the Boolean values true and false are lowercase in decision tables. However, Excel automatically displays Boolean values in uppercase: TRUE and FALSE. In this case, you must set Excel to treat the Boolean values as text to retain their lowercase format for their transfer back to the decision table.

How you transfer information depends on its role and formatting. The contents of cells can be transferred between cells, while a complete row or column must be transferred as a group of cells.

Note:

The menu commands do not work in all browsers. You must use the keyboard shortcuts in some browsers. Also, when pasting from an external source, specifically from Excel, make sure that there is no region in the table that is marked as the paste source, which is indicated with an orange rectangle. The paste operation always selects an available source within the table first, and then checks for data in the clipboard.
If you copy and paste content from a decision table in the Business console to Excel, you might see hyphens in cells, which represent grouped cells in the decision table. In this context, a hyphen in a cell means the cells above it must be grouped in the decision table. If you need to insert an actual hyphen, use quotation marks around it: "-"