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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Calling decision services using Visual Basic for Applications

There are plenty of good reasons to consider linking Excel and your decision service using VBA. You may have many years of experience in Visual Basic. Or you may have inherited a code base that uses a lot of VBA logic, and your organization isn’t ready to migrate away from it. Since this chapter assumes familiarity with Visual Basic, if it’s been a while since you used it, take a look at Appendix A, for a refresher.

Do I really need to know about Visual Basic for Applications?

The simple answer to that question is no. If this is your first time scripting in Excel, you don’t need to know VBA since it is a legacy solution. Unless you or your company already use Visual Basic extensively, please skip to the next section, Meet Microsoft Script Lab – a modern version of VBA, to read about a better alternative.

I have a lot of fondness for Visual Basic. It formed an important stepping-stone...