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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Other workflows – Kogito Business Automation and Power Automate Desktop

This chapter focused on Power Automate for a reason, since it is the most (Power) user-friendly workflow tool. But there are two other workflow tools you are likely to encounter – Power Automate Desktop and the workflow that comes with Kogito Business Automation.

Power Automate Desktop

You (briefly) saw the Desktop version of Power Automate, as it was an option when we were creating a new cloud flow in Figure 8.3. If you created a desktop flow, you would have been prompted to install the desktop tool (although it comes pre-installed in Windows 11; consult the Power Automate Desktop documentation for more details). You would have been presented with an opening screen as in Figure 8.32:

Figure 8.32 – Power Automate Desktop

Figure 8.32 – Power Automate Desktop

Many of the concepts for using Power Automate Desktop are similar to using the cloud version. Power Automate Desktop also has an HTTP connector...