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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Summary

In this chapter, you learned that you are not alone in your frustrations with Excel, but that it is far too important of a tool to abandon. We looked at enterprise solutions that can solve some of the problems you are facing, but often these have an overly large gap to bridge before they are useful to you. Trying to bridge this gap, we looked at the core business problems we might use Excel for and discovered that AI, and in particular a rules-based approach, might be able to help.

One good surprise is that business rules are very familiar, and we might have used them already without knowing it. We discovered that Excel is actually a much more powerful tool than we give it credit for and that we don’t need to fully replace it, just upgrade certain parts – if we aren’t afraid to delve under the bonnet. We also mentioned that while other solutions are available, an approach based on business rules is a good investment since it has a large element of future...