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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Introduction to macros and VBA

When launched in 1993 (yes, 1993), VBA was revolutionary. Earlier versions of Excel and other spreadsheets had Macros, which offered little more than a replay of user keystrokes. VBA provided the ability to record user actions as a programming language (similar to the popular Basic language of the day) and then allowed users to modify that in the code editor. It gave an easy path for Excel power users (like you!) to learn to solve problems while leaving the door open to upgrade to more scalable enterprise solutions.

These days, VBA is not switched on by default in Excel, so you’ll need to enable it so you can see what it looks like. We’ll start by enabling the Developer tab on the Excel ribbon:

  1. In the Excel Options menu, select the File options, then Customize Ribbon. You’ll see a dialog similar to Figure AA.1:

Figure AA.1 – Enabling the Developer ribbon in Excel

  1. Within this...