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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Running Docker and a tour of Docker Desktop

As we congratulate ourselves on successfully installing Docker, let’s take a tour of Docker Desktop and run a sample image to ensure that everything is working as it should:

  1. Start Docker Desktop. There should be a Docker icon on your desktop, so double-click it. It can also be started via the Windows Start menu (a similar icon should be available there).
  2. Accept the Docker service/license agreement.
  3. Wait while Docker Desktop (and background services) starts – the wait message is shown in Figure 10.2:
Figure 10.2 – Docker Desktop starting

Figure 10.2 – Docker Desktop starting

  1. When Docker has started, you should see the home screen, as shown in Figure 10.3. If you don’t see this exact screen, try clicking on Containers in the top-left corner:

Figure 10.3 – Docker Desktop home screen

Figure 10.3 – Docker Desktop home screen

  1. If your screen is showing the green Docker whale icon (in the bottom...