What this book covers
Chapter 1, Wrestling with Excel? You Are Not Alone, outlines the problems you might face in Excel, but reassures you that you are not the only person to encounter these issues and shows how an AI-based rules approach can help.
Chapter 2, Choosing an AI and Business Rules Engine – Why KIE and Drools?, shows why the rules engine and AI tools from the KIE project are the best choices for you as an Excel user, and welcomes you to an open community supported by IBM and Red Hat in which you can get ongoing support.
Chapter 3, Your First Business Rule with the Online KIE Sandbox, dives into writing your business rule and creating your first decision model in the online KIE Sandbox using a classic Hello World example.
Chapter 4, More Decision Models, Business Rules, and Decision Tables, expands your knowledge of decision models and builds out a working chocolate shop example to show more of the tools available.
Chapter 5, Sharing and Deploying Decision Models Using OpenShift Cloud and GitHub, looks at making your decision models sharable, allowing other people to run them in the cloud, and using online tools to collaborate with colleagues on the model’s design.
Chapter 6, Calling Business Rules from Excel Using Power Query, links Excel to our AI, rules, and decision tables using the Power Query tool built into Excel.
Chapter 7, Using Business Rules in Excel with Visual Basic, Script Lab, and Office Script, gives three alternative script-based methods to give you more choices on how you link Excel with your business rules.
Chapter 8, AI and Decision Services within Excel and Power Automate Workflows, introduces Microsoft’s business automation tool and shows how we can use our models to make decisions at key points in a flow.
Chapter 9, Advanced Expressions, Decision Models, and Testing, explores the full power of the expression language built into KIE and introduces the scenario testing tools so we can guarantee our decision models behave as we expect.
Chapter 10, Scaling Rules in Business Central with Docker and the Cloud, demonstrates the power of the KIE and Kogito decision-making tools, leveraging containers to increase our deployment options and editing capability.
Chapter 11, Rules-Based AI and Machine Learning – Combining the Best of Both, introduces the other main part of AI and shows how we can use the tools in KIE and Azure ML Studio to deploy both machine learning and rules-based decision models alongside each other.
Chapter 12, What Next? A Look Inside Neural Networks, Enterprise Projects, Advanced Rules, and the Rules Engine, expands on the previous chapters and gives key areas for future learning with practical first steps on neural networks, Enterprise Java projects, and ethical, explainable AI.
Appendix A, Introduction to Visual Basic for Applications, introduces just enough Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) so that those of you who are new to the language can understand the VBA examples in that section of Chapter 7.
Appendix B, Testing Using VS Code, Azure, and GitHub Codespaces, introduces the Visual Studio Code (VS Code) editor from Microsoft – while it is more advanced than the tools in the main chapters of the book, many of you will appreciate its power for testing and building projects in Azure and Codespaces.
Appendix C, Troubleshooting Docker, supports the instructions given in Chapter 10; most of you will not need this and will experience a smooth Docker installation – but it is good to know there is support here if needed.