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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Preparing your laptop for Docker

There are also some simple steps you may need to take to prepare your computer before installing Docker:

  • Behind the scenes, Docker will use one of two sophisticated technologies to run containers: Hyper-V or WSL.
  • Hyper-V is a very clever technology that allows software running in containers (such as Docker) to run almost as fast as native applications. It’s a combination of hardware and operating system (OS) support.
  • Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) allows you to run the full power of the Linux OS (and enterprise solutions that run on it) on your Windows laptop. If this sounds similar to what Docker gives you, you’d be correct. Both technologies use many of the same components, even if they are optimized for different things.
  • The approach Docker chooses will depend on the specification of your laptop. To keep things simple, the following instructions walk through how to switch between both.

Switching between...