Book Image

AI and Business Rule Engines for Excel Power Users

By : Alex Porcelli, Paul Browne
Book Image

AI and Business Rule Engines for Excel Power Users

By: Alex Porcelli, Paul Browne

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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

A Power Automate flow to call our decision service

Our second example flow will call our decision service – so make sure the decision service is up and running, using an updated token if you’re hosting it in the OpenShift Developer sandbox. Our example will also demonstrate using variables, and how to save the results in Excel.

Since the steps of adding more actions to the flow are the same as in our earlier example, we’re not going to go into as much detail. We will show the flow we’re aiming for, and the settings for each step of the flow. Where anything else is different, we will highlight it. One of the differences is that we will need to prepare a table in Excel to output our results.

Preparing our Excel output table

Our Excel output table is pretty simple, but it will automatically get picked up by some of the actions in Power Automate – so let’s walk through creating it step by step:

  1. Start by opening Excel and creating...