Book Image

AI and Business Rule Engines for Excel Power Users

By : Paul Browne (GBP), PORCELLI
Book Image

AI and Business Rule Engines for Excel Power Users

By: Paul Browne (GBP), PORCELLI

Overview of this book

Microsoft Excel is widely adopted across diverse industries, but Excel Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets. They need a better enterprise-level solution, and this book introduces Business rules combined with the power of AI to tackle the limitations of Excel. This guide will give you a roadmap to link KIE (an industry-standard open-source application) to Microsoft’s business process automation tools, such as Power Automate, Power Query, Office Script, Forms, VBA, Script Lab, and GitHub. You’ll dive into the graphical Decision Modeling standard including decision tables, FEEL expressions, and advanced business rule editing and testing. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to share your business knowledge as graphical models, deploy and execute these models in the cloud (with Azure and OpenShift), link them back to Excel, and then execute them as an end-to-end solution removing human intervention. You’ll be equipped to solve your Excel queries and start using the next generation of Microsoft Office tools.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1:The Problem with Excel, and Why Rule-Based AI Can Be the Solution
5
Part 2: Writing Business Rules and Decision Models – with Real-Life Examples
9
Part 3: Extending Excel, Decision Models, and Business Process Automation into a Complete Enterprise Solution
13
Part 4: Next Steps in AI, Machine Learning, and Rule Engines
Appendix A - Introduction to Visual Basic for Applications

Part 1:The Problem with Excel, and Why Rule-Based AI Can Be the Solution

The first part of the book builds the case, showing how an AI and business rules approach can help solve the problems you are encountering in Excel.

This section includes the following chapters:

  • Chapter 1, Wrestling with Excel? You Are Not Alone, outlines the problems you may be facing in Excel, but reassures you that you are not the only person to encounter these issues and shows how an AI-based rule approach can help.
  • Chapter 2, Choosing an AI and Business Rules Engine – Why KIE and Drools?, shows why the rules engine and AI tools from the KIE project are the best choice for you as an Excel user and welcomes you to an open community supported by IBM and Red Hat where you can get ongoing support.
  • Chapter 3, Your First Business Rule with the Online KIE Sandbox, dives into writing business rules and creating your first decision model in the online KIE Sandbox using a classic Hello World example.