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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Setting up scenario testing in VSCode

Now that we’re a little bit more familiar with the VSCode environment, let’s use it to set up the KIE Scenario Simulation and testing tools. Since VSCode is an advanced text editor focused on development, the test tools are designed to be run automatically as part of the build process.

What is a build tool?

A build tool is needed to transform text source files into a running project. The steps the build tool can take include downloading supporting libraries, compiling the text into runnable code, packaging the project into a deployable file, and running any specified tests. Since KIE and Kogito is a Java-based project, Maven is the standard build tool.

As a build tool, Maven can also automate many of the setup steps for us. The steps we suggest in this section are based on the following article from the KIE team: https://blog.kie.org/2021/04/how-to-use-test-scenario-editor-to-test-your-dmn-asset-in-vscode.html. Because this...