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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Wrestling with Excel? You Are Not Alone

If you read the Preface, you will know that a lot of people use Excel, being one of them, and that you are not the only person frustrated with the limitations of it as a tool.

Based on the fact that you have read on, you must now know that this book can help you. But before we can go into how exactly it can help, it’s worth exploring in detail the problems we’re trying to solve. In this chapter, we’ll cover the following:

  • Why do you use Excel?
  • Enterprise solutions and the gap between them and Excel
  • What’s your real business problem?
  • What is artificial intelligence and which type can help you best?
  • Practical artificial intelligence and business rules
  • Splitting Excel into different pieces