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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Troubleshooting Docker – some obvious things

Most people will not need this section of the book. But if you do need it, then you will be reassured that you’re not the only person to meet these common issues:

  • Check that your laptop meets the technical requirements (the type of laptop and version of Windows) for running Docker. These are listed at https://docs.docker.com/desktop/windows/install/. Docker will give you a clear error message if it doesn’t.
  • When installing software, you may have seen a popup similar to the following screenshot. It means that your computer is under the control of your IT team. This is mainly a good thing (as it stops malicious software), but it does mean you need their support to install Docker:

Figure AC.2 – An admin permission dialog

  • Windows Defender sometimes blocks network and internet access – we want to allow it as we need to be able to connect and run our samples...