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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Modeling our customer service flow in Power Automate

Since the customer service flow gathers information, let’s start by taking a look at Microsoft Forms.

Introduction to Microsoft Forms

Microsoft Forms is a free offering that forms (excuse the pun) part of Office online. You may have used it already, or similar offerings such as Google Forms or SurveyMonkey. Forms is available at https://forms.office.com/. It’s easiest to use the same Microsoft account that you’re hosting for your Power Automate flow, as it will help in linking them later.

On this page, click New Flow to create a new form. We’ll edit it step by step:

  1. The form will initially be untitled – click to give it a name.
  2. Click Add New to add your first (text) question. Let’s call it Email.
  3. Click Add New again to add another text question. Let’s call it Customer Number.
  4. Click on the options beside this question, select restrictions, and choose...