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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: “The formula to match with the first 10,000 customers is Customer.Number < 10000.”

A block of code is set as follows:

let
   // "SourceUrl" with quotes needs to match the named range on our Excel sheet. You may need to change {1} to {0} depending on when your first line begins
   pSourceUrl = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="SourceUrl"]}[Content]{1}[Column1]
in
   pSourceUrl

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

let
   // "SourceUrl" with quotes needs to match the named range on our Excel sheet. You may need to change {1} to {0} depending on when your first line begins
   pSourceUrl = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="SourceUrl"]}[Content]{1}[Column1]
in
   pSourceUrl

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

curl -X 'POST' \
  'https://dmn-dev-sandbox-yu88rl6qu490-crt-openshift-dev.apps.sandbox.x8i5.p1.openshiftapps.com/Customer Recommendations/Product Recommendation Service' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
  "Customer": {
    "Number": 0,
    "Name": "string",
    "Date of Birth": "2022-10-23",
    "Country of Residence": "string",
    "Special Requests": "diabetic",
    "Previous Orders": [
      0
    ]
  }
}'

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: “Click Done at the bottom right of the screen to save the code and exit the screen.”

Tips or important notes

Appear like this.