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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Four different ways to work with business rules

Now that we know about containers, let’s look at the four main ways we will use them to run business rules as we work through this book. Remember that unlike Excel, the choice of tool to edit rules is separate from the choice of engine to run the rules. We present the four main choices here in a way that keeps things simple, but you still have the option to pick and choose between them.

These options start with the simplest and work up to the more powerful. This is in line with our journey from Excel to enterprise-grade solutions. In all four suggestions, we continue to use Excel from our laptop and call the business rule engine no matter where it is located:

  1. Editing in KIE Sandbox online, using KIE extended services on your laptop as the engine: This is the solution we start with as it is the easiest to use. It hides a lot of the complexity, which is great for getting started, but works best for single users.
  2. Editing...