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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Five different ways to link rules, AI, decision models, and Excel

At the end of Chapter 5, we saw that KIE and Kogito autogenerate a web page based on our decision model. We’ll soon see that there is a machine-readable version of this page that we can link to Excel. That page won’t change no matter what technique we use. Figure 6.1 shows some of the ways we can make this link.

Figure 6.1– Many different ways of linking Excel to our decision service

Figure 6.1– Many different ways of linking Excel to our decision service

You may be familiar with some of the techniques listed in this diagram – even if you’re not, we’ll run through them in the next section. The key point is that no matter which technique you choose, the core Kogito decision service (including your business rules and AI) stays the same. That allows you to choose the technique that works best for you now, knowing that your investment in decision models is still valid even as you evolve toward other tools.

It is highly...