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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

What is Office Scripts?

While all Excel users have access to Script Lab, not everybody will have access to Office Scripts – yet. Since we already know it shares the Office.js approach to manipulating Excel through scripts, what is the difference between the two?

  • While it is very similar to Script Lab, Office Scripts is slightly easier to use. For example, some of the boilerplate async calls and error-handling functions are hidden from us.
  • Office Scripts has a recorder to make notes of our actions in Excel and transcribe them into scripts. This is very useful for learning about Office.js in particular.
  • Office Scripts comes pre-installed in Office 365 online – although it may need to be enabled by an administrator.
  • It is easier to share scripts. While (like in Script Lab) the script sits outside the workbook, by adding a button to the worksheet, anybody who can see the Excel sheet can also see the script.
  • Office Scripts is highly integrated with...