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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Using AI and Decision Services Within Power Automate Workflows

What we’ve achieved in the two previous chapters is to move business decisions out of Excel and into our Drools decision service hosted in Kogito. That works well, but we still have to trigger the process manually when needed.

In real life, making a decision is likely to be one of many steps that we take to answer a customer’s question. Wouldn’t it be great to automate this end-to-end work, creating a flow that calls our decision as needed? This chapter shows you how you can in the following topics:

  • What is a workflow?
  • What is Power Automate, and why use it?
  • Calling business rules and decision services from Power Automate
  • Implementing our customer service flow in Power Automate
  • Alternatives, such as Power Automate Desktop and Kogito business automation

Power Automate is a very user-friendly tool – but also very powerful. Our aim in this chapter is to give you...