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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Advanced Expressions, Decision Models, and Testing

If you listened to our encouragement after Chapters 3 and 4, you may have tried building your own decision models. Hopefully, you then explored the different ways of linking your model to Excel in Chapters 6, 7, and 8 and found the one that works best for you. But as your models become more complex, you may find that things don’t work as smoothly as you’d like.

This chapter aims to fix that – we’ll explain some more features of the FEEL expression language to make your business rules more expressive. We’ll cover ways to structure your decision models to reduce their complexity. We’ll introduce testing, and why it is always better for you to break your rules before anybody else. Along the way, we’ll give you glimpses of editing tools outside of the KIE sandbox that show you how powerful the tools within the KIE ecosystem are.

The chapter will cover the following main topics:

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