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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Other UI elements in KIE Sandbox

On the Decision Model page of KIE Sandbox, if we click on the Decision Navigator icon (the flag-like icon at the top right), KIE will show Decision Navigator, like in Figure 3.27:

Figure 3.27 – Decision Navigator view

Figure 3.27 – Decision Navigator view

The Decision Navigator view is another layout to represent the same Decision Model – this time, as a tree-like structure. All the nodes are the same, but it is easier to see the content of the nodes (for example, when we use a literal expression to make our decision). Clicking on the elements in Decision Navigator will jump to the relevant part of the diagram.

Also on the right-hand side of the screen is Explore diagram. The icon looks like an eye, as highlighted in Figure 3.28:

Figure 3.28 – Explore diagram

Figure 3.28 – Explore diagram

Explore diagram is really useful for exploring larger decision models – which is why Figure 3.28 shows the more complicated sample Decision...