If I have a maven pom that uses the kie maven plugin org.kie:kie-maven-plugin to build the kljar for deployment, and the project kjar has a ruleTemplate:
<ruleTemplate dtable="rules/business/TermSearchQFRules.xls"
template="rules/business/templates/TermSearchQF.drt"
row="2" col="1"/>
The build will fail with an error:
ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.kie:kie-maven-plugin:7.8.0.Final:build (default-build) on project ba-search-kjar: Execution default-build of goal org.kie:kie-maven-plugin:7.8.0.Final:build failed: No RuleTable cells in spreadsheet. -> [Help 1]
org.apache.maven.lifecycle.LifecycleExecutionException: Failed to execute goal org.kie:kie-maven-plugin:7.8.0.Final:build (default-build) on project ba-search-kjar: Execution default-build of goal org.kie:kie-maven-plugin:7.8.0.Final:build failed: No RuleTable cells in spreadsheet.
Caused by: org.apache.maven.plugin.PluginExecutionException: Execution default-build of goal org.kie:kie-maven-plugin:7.8.0.Final:build failed: No RuleTable cells in spreadsheet.
at org.apache.maven.plugin.DefaultBuildPluginManager.executeMojo(DefaultBuildPluginManager.java:110)
at org.apache.maven.lifecycle.internal.MojoExecutor.execute(MojoExecutor.java:209)
... 19 more
Caused by: org.drools.template.parser.DecisionTableParseException: No RuleTable cells in spreadsheet.

This is because the plugin doesn't understand the rule template, and treats the xls file as a decision table spreadsheet rather than a template spreadsheet.

The kie-maven-plugin is a useful tool that compiles the kjar are build time rather than load time, and gives good diagnostics.