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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Scaling Rules in Business Central with Docker and the Cloud

In the previous chapter, we got our first glimpse of the Scenario Simulation tool as a device for testing complex decision models. The instructions we introduced in Appendix B might also have sparked your interest in exploring advanced techniques in VS Code. But since that technical approach isn’t for everybody, you could still be looking for another advanced way to test your models.

Happily, Business Central provides the same Scenario Simulation tool in a more user-friendly package. This chapter shows you how to set up the Business Central editor and explores some of the additional rule editing techniques that it provides. In particular, we look at it as an enterprise-level collaboration tool for sharing and editing decision models.

Since we are going to use Docker containers to run Business Central, we will also solve another problem we encountered in Chapter 5. While we already know how to host our decision...