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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Preface

Think about a world without Excel. That’s just impossible for me.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO

Most of us agree with Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella. If you include similar products (and Google doesn’t release the exact figures for Sheets), there are over a billion of us who can’t do without Excel or a similar spreadsheet to organize our daily work and our professional and personal lives.

But you’re a special member of this billion-strong group. You’re a member of the group of Excel Power users that push the limits of this tool. You’re the person that colleagues go to with the trickiest Excel problems, and you get them fixed. You’re the person that knows it can be done in Excel, even if you need to delve into the furthest corner of the web to get the answer. You’re the person with the key knowledge that your business runs on – all captured in the trusty Excel file format.

If you’re reading this book, you know you have a problem. Excel will always be a core part of your working life – but you know it can be better. You’ve lost track of the hours spent searching to find a mistake in a sheet that somebody else introduced. You’re tired of having to explain to colleagues how the sheets actually work, and you suspect they’re not listening in order to avoid being burdened with maintaining them. In a world where AI is popping up everywhere, your current Excel solution may require just a bit too much human intervention.

This book suggests a better way by building on your existing knowledge of Excel.