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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Running scenario testing in VSCode

Setting up the scenario testing to be included in these automatic tests requires some final small steps:

  1. Our decision models (dmn files) are currently in the root folder of the project. To be included in our Maven testing, they need to be in the sample-kogito/src/main/resources folder. Drag and drop the files across to this location.

Moving the decision model files is important

If you don’t move the decision files, most of the following steps will appear to work, but the actual tests won’t run correctly.

  1. To let the automatic tests know that they should run Scenario Simulation, create the KogitoScenarioJunitActivatorTest.java file in the sample-kogito src/test/testscenario folder.
  2. Open this new file in the editor and put the following contents in – this will automatically pick up and run any scesim (Scenario Simulation) tests:
    package testscenario;
    @org.junit.runner.RunWith(org.kogito.scenariosimulation...