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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Dynamic lists, contexts, and relations

You might remember in Chapter 4 that we graphically created List using a decision node of the List type. Look at Figure 4.25 if you want to refresh your memory – it was a great way to clearly show the health issues we were looking for. But lists are much more dynamic than that. We already said that we could use FEEL expressions anywhere – and that includes within lists. For example, the list in Figure 9.1 is a valid syntax. This example can be downloaded from the sample site (https://github.com/PacktPublishing/AI-and-Business-Rules-for-Excel-Power-Users) as c-09-dynamic-lists.dmn.

Figure 9.1 – Generating our list values dynamically

Figure 9.1 – Generating our list values dynamically

We’ve manipulated the figure so we can show the main diagram, our list values, and the input/output in one picture. You will have to press the Edit node and Run button on the screen to view similar results.

Date and time functions in FEEL

As you’...