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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Swagger – a more human-friendly link to Kogito

While REST is not unfriendly, Kogito helpfully uses a tool called Swagger to make REST pages even easier to understand.

We’ll pick up where we left off in Chapter 5 where we deployed our decision model to the OpenShift cloud (dev sandbox) and shared the web page for our colleagues to admire. It’s worth going back to that web page now – remember that it looks similar to Figure 6.3.

Figure 6.3 – A reminder of what our decision model looks like in the cloud

Figure 6.3 – A reminder of what our decision model looks like in the cloud

Remember – you may need to restart/redeploy to OpenShift

As a friendly reminder, the OpenShift dev sandbox times out after 24 hours – you may need to go through the instructions in Chapter 5 again, to link the KIE sandbox to OpenShift. You may be getting tired of this renew-every-24 hours limitation. We’ll fix that in Chapter 10 when we look at more places we can deploy our decision models.

Getting...