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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Artificial intelligence and which type can help you best

On a bad day at the office, you've probably had the great idea of either cloning yourself or one of your key team members. That way, you could leave your clone working away while you do more important things, or just take a break at the beach.

Just to be clear, this book does not recommend cloning humans as a practical solution!

What is possible is applying recent advances in AI to the problem. Surely if we live in a world of almost self-driving cars, we could train a computer to capture and process the knowledge in our Excel sheets, in a way that can solve many of the problems that we’ve talked about?

Will AI take my job?

You may read this and think, if a computer can do my job, what am I going to do? With almost every bit of automation in the last 200 years, about 80% of your job can be automated, and it’s normally the boring and repetitive bits. If the boring bits are automated, it leaves room...