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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

As you’ve seen, KIE Sandbox supports editing decision models with both ML and rule-based elements. Up until now, we’ve taken for granted the ability to edit these combined models using KIE Sandbox.

The ability to execute combined rules and ML model features is already present in the other KIE decision model tools—for example, the VS Code plugin you may have used in Appendix B. While it is on the roadmap to be added to the KIE Sandbox Extended Services, it has not yet (at the time of writing) been implemented.

While we have already proven the main point of this chapter (an introduction to ML), showing the power of the two approaches working together, this is a practical book. I really want to leave you with tools for running these combined ML and rules models. So, Table 11.1 shows the choices you have right now as an Excel power user to execute these combined models:

Option...