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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

More on Decision Models

Since we jumped into our example and focused on getting a working business rule, we only got a hint of what Decision models are. Officially called DMN, the three key benefits are as follows:

  • Decision models are accessible to business users. You could share the Hello World example with a colleague and have them understand what is going on – without any technical training.
  • Decision models are executable. Unlike other diagrams, there is no need for a technical colleague to translate them into executable code. We might take this for granted in Excel, but it’s a radical idea. In other solutions, the diagram and the code often drift apart, so we can never be totally sure of the business decision-making process. Since Decision Models are executable, we don’t have that problem – what is in the diagram is how the decision gets made.
  • Decision models are an agreed standard. You’ve probably already scrawled similar diagrams...