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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Choosing an AI and Business Rules Engine – Why Drools and KIE?

In the previous chapter, you saw how a rules-based AI approach could help solve your Excel problems. However, you’re not going to get very far without choosing a full business rules engine to execute your rules.

This chapter takes you through potential rule engine solutions available on the market and chooses one that we will use throughout the book. It also shows you why it’s important to think not only about solving your immediate problem but also about how you’re going to work with colleagues and scale your solution in the future. To do this, we are going to do the following:

  • Understand the different types of people reading this book and find out which group you fall into
  • Look at many of the available rule engines and evaluate them against our criteria
  • Explain why open source provides a huge advantage for support and how it helps confirm our choice of which rule engine to...