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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Splitting Excel into different pieces

We use Excel so much that we don’t pause to think how powerful it is. While it looks like a single block, Excel can be broken down into many different components. Figure 1.8 shows one simple way of breaking out Excel into different parts.

Figure 1.8 – Excel broken into simple model, view, controller pieces

Figure 1.8 – Excel broken into simple model, view, controller pieces

This pattern is a way of breaking up Excel into more simple parts, each with one key job to do:

  • You give commands to Excel using the controller. Typically, this means clicking on a command in the toolbar, on the menu, or elsewhere on the page, which makes Excel do something. This something usually changes the model.
  • The model is how Excel stores its data. If you’ve imported CSV or other non-Excel formats before, you may have a clearer idea of this. These formats are pure data, without any functions or VBA code.
  • Excel can present this data as one or more views. When the model updates...