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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Taking care of your data

We’re glad about the trend of legislation toward increased data privacy. As professionals who work with data, we have been known to curse the regulations sometimes, but in many ways, it’s just ensuring what we hope you would seek to do anyway: be respectful when working with personal data.

Personal data is anything that could identify a person—a phone number associated with a name, an email (since that will often always include the first name or last name), or an address. For example, if we’re talking about a male, under 21, living at 59 Bolton Square, it may be obvious who the person we’re talking about is.

Even if you don’t live in Europe, you’ve probably felt the impact of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). For example, if you’re US-based, and you’re dealing with a client that lives in the EU, the regulation still gives that client protection, with the thread of...