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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Troubleshooting Docker

While this is a book mainly about KIE and not Docker, we did want to give enough detail to get things up and running. The topics in Chapter 10 and this appendix are straightforward but are at the edge of what we would reasonably expect an Excel power user to know. Using Docker gives us a gateway to running Business Central and deploying it into the cloud – both areas that will take a team, not just an individual, to build. So don’t be afraid to ask colleagues for help!

In an ideal scenario, you will not need to read this appendix, since it contains suggestions on how to fix things if something goes wrong in starting Docker. We have written these instructions with an Excel power user in mind – so if you are an experienced Docker developer, you may wish to go directly to the Docker guides to start your troubleshooting.

There are three main sections in this appendix:

  • Preparing your laptop to use Docker
  • Troubleshooting error...