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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Roundup of decision model deployment options

Back in Chapter 2, we promised you four main ways to run our decision models. Now that we’ve completed deploying our rules into Docker-based servers, let’s take a look at those options again. Our options for deploying our rules include the following:

  • Running KIE Sandbox with the web-based rules editor: We have used this solution for most of this book, starting with Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, as it is so easy to get started.
  • Running containers on your laptop or another computer (server) that you have access to: We covered these methods in detail in this chapter and Appendix C, with containers giving us a wide range of deployment options.
  • Running an image in the cloud (hosted by Microsoft or IBM/Red Hat): We introduced this approach in Chapter 5, where we deployed our rules into OpenShift. We expanded this approach in Chapter 9 and Appendix B to deploy into Codespaces and VS Code online on Azure. And this chapter...