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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Writing our first business rule

Now that we are ready to write our first business rule, getting started is as simple as opening your browser. Most modern browsers will do – Chrome, Safari, or Edge. At the time of writing, the current version of Firefox is missing a feature to run the KIE Sandbox, but this is likely to be resolved soon. In your browser, go to http://dmn.new (mirrored at https://sandbox.kie.org ). You should see a page similar to the one shown in Figure 3.1:

Figure 3.1 – KIE Sandbox home screen

Figure 3.1 – KIE Sandbox home screen

A lot of time is being invested in evolving the KIE editors, so there may be some differences between this screenshot and what you see on your laptop. However, there’s no need to worry since the decision editors are based on the DMN standard (more on that soon), so any differences will very likely be cosmetic.

On the KIE Sandbox home page, there are three options:

  • We’ll touch on workflows in Chapter 8, AI and...