Book Image

AI and Business Rule Engines for Excel Power Users

By : Paul Browne
Book Image

AI and Business Rule Engines for Excel Power Users

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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Summary and further reading

We’ve linked to a lot of additional resources throughout this chapter. The KIE project blog has some very useful posts and videos about using test scenarios that are well worth spending time on. And if you want to explore DMN in more detail, an excellent next step is reading DMN Method and Style by Bruce Silver.

But we’re not finished yet on these topics in this book. Chapter 10 (where we cover installing Docker and Business Central) gives us another way to run our scenario testing editor. This is just as well, as the Machine Learning we cover in Chapter 11 needs testing, even more than the rules-based AI that we’ve covered to date. Finally, in Chapter 12, we introduce the DRL format, a more advanced rule-writing format that works well alongside the graphical DMN notation that we learned more about in this chapter.

This chapter aimed to give you a more advanced understanding of both decision models and the FEEL expression language...