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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

The KIE Server in Docker and Azure

So far in this book, the two main environments to deploy and execute our rules in have been the OpenShift Sandbox that we described in Chapter 5 and the KIE Extended Services that we introduced in Chapter 3. Even if the KIE Sandbox web page appears to be running the rules, a quick look at the logs shows that it is the KIE Extended Services that is doing the heavy lifting of executing the rules.

This split between the editor where we write our rules and the server where we run our rules is very powerful. It means we can choose the editor that works best for us (KIE Sandbox, VS Code, or Business Central). And we can then choose the best server environment to deploy our rules.

We’ll see in the next section that Docker containers give us an enormous choice of options for where we can deploy our rules, so much choice that we can’t cover every option! But we will give you places where you can learn more. We’ll focus on replacing...