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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Using Business Rules in Excel with Visual Basic, Script Lab, or Office Scripts

In the previous chapter, we said that no matter what technique we use to link Excel to our decision service, the approach is similar. We’ll prove that in this chapter. Power Query is a great approach but has limitations. We’ll explore linking Excel and decision services using Visual Basic, Script Lab, or Office Scripts – which approach you use is your choice. Along the way, we’ll cover the following topics:

  • Calling decision services from Excel using Visual Basic for Applications
  • Installing Microsoft Script Lab and using it to link Excel with our decision service
  • Introduction to Office Scripts and making the link to our decision service using that Excel script online

Why are we covering multiple ways of doing essentially the same thing? We’ll explain that in this chapter as well, exploring the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.

Since it...