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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Which business rule engine to use

We saw in the previous chapter that rules engines can be embedded in many places that you don’t expect (such as Excel and Outlook). There are hundreds of rule engine-like projects out there. So, how do we filter through these to pick one that can run the hands-on examples in this book? We’ll do this filtering based on the following criteria:

  • We need a good user interface for editing rules, aimed at business users. This rules out Jess and Prolog, which are very powerful but need a lot of technical knowledge.
  • The main focus of the product should be rules. For example, we’ll see other products later in the book that use workflows (for example, Microsoft Power Automate). These are great for doing steps in order but don’t have as powerful decision-making capabilities.
  • Since you’re in learning or trying things out mode, you want it not only to be free to download but also free from hefty license costs in...