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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Summary

We achieved a lot in this chapter – we went from talking about business rules as an abstract concept, to executing business rules using hands-on tools such as KIE Sandbox.

Along the way, we saw how Decision Models are another way to represent our business rules, and their highly visual format meant that we could quickly build two samples. We downloaded and ran KIE Sandbox Extended Services to evaluate our Decision Model and saw some of the different data types on which we can base our decisions.

We took a tour of the UI to understand how we can import and export decision models, and where to access previous models that KIE has autosaved for us. We also saw some of the other views of Decision Models, which are especially useful when sharing them with colleagues for validation.

However, there were several key points in the chapter where we understood Decision Models, rule engines, and the FEEL expression language are much more powerful than we’ve previously...