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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Summary

We set expectations at the start of the chapter for how, although we would introduce Power Automate, we would focus on how to link Excel into decision services as part of a complete end-to-end flow.

What we covered in this chapter was workflows, and why we use Power Automate as the workflow tool for this book. We then moved on to how to call business rules and decision services from Power Automate. Finally, we built our full customer services flow in Power Automate, and looked at other workflow tools such as Power Automate Desktop and Kogito business automation.

This chapter was the third (out of three) covering the Microsoft tools to link Excel to our decision service – not just using Power Automate, but other options such as Power Query, VBA, and Script Lab/Office Scripts. Given the power of all these tools, they are well worth exploring further.

Now that we have linked Excel to our decision service, our attention in the next chapters focuses on doing more...