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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

What is (and why) Power Automate?

Microsoft Power Automate (formerly known as Flow) is one of the hundreds of workflow offerings on the market – do a search for Workflow Engine if you want to look for yourself. So why does this book choose it, especially when Kogito also has a workflow engine built in?

  • As a Microsoft product, Power Automate is highly integrated with Office, including Excel. The hosted version is available online, without setup, to most Office users.
  • Power Automate is aimed at Excel Power users – a good crossover with the readership of this book. Meanwhile, Kogito’s workflow engine is more complex and is targeted at developers. And Power Automate strikes a nice balance – while easy to use, it is still more powerful than consumer-orientated services such as IFTTT.com.
  • Power Automate follows the Business Process Model Notation (BPMN) standard, so many of the concepts you learn about in this chapter will be applicable to other...