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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Part 3: Extending Excel, Decision Models, and Business Process Automation into a Complete Enterprise Solution

Even if you stopped reading the book after the previous section, you would have an end-to-end solution to include business rules and AI in Excel. But the tools have so much more power, well worth exploring further to build scalable, robust, and enterprise-level solutions.

This section includes the following chapters:

  • Chapter 7, Using Business Rules in Excel with Visual Basic, Script Lab, and Office Scripts, offers three alternative script-based methods to give you more choices about how you link Excel with your business rules.
  • Chapter 8, AI and Decision Services within Excel and Power Automate Workflows, introduces Microsoft’s business automation tool and shows how we can use our models to make decisions at key points in a flow.
  • Chapter 9, Advanced Expressions, Decision Models, and Testing, explores the full power of the expression language built into...