Book Image

AI and Business Rule Engines for Excel Power Users

By : Alex Porcelli, Paul Browne
Book Image

AI and Business Rule Engines for Excel Power Users

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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

How to design and build enterprise solutions

You saw in the previous chapter that in solving your problems with Excel, you were taking steps toward more robust enterprise-type solutions. We explained that unlike Excel, enterprise solutions are built by many people, but can also be used by many people at one time.

As you evaluate whether KIE/Drools can solve your immediate problems with Excel, you need to know that it will continue to solve your problems in the long term. That’s why we’re including this section – just enough about designing and building enterprise solutions. It should assure you that you have a roadmap to deploy and support Kogito as part of a bigger system over the longer term.

Already in this book, you have seen hints that the enterprise software world is similar but also very different from the Excel world:

  • In the previous chapter, we broke Excel down into three parts (model/data, as well as view and controller). Whatever enterprise...