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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Common decision patterns

If you’ve created lots of spreadsheets, you probably found that you repeat common patterns again and again. This might be presenting instructions or top-level figures on the first tab of your spreadsheet. It might be a hidden (or locked) sheet containing the complex formula. Or it might be a pivot table displayed beside a graph so that people can see a quick overview or drill into the detail.

We don’t repeat these patterns out of laziness, although saving time is a good thing. We will repeat these patterns because they work and because familiar patterns are easier for people to understand. Programmers call repeatable solutions like these design patterns, and actively look to apply the patterns they’ve used previously as part of the problem-solving process.

In decision models, there are also repeatable patterns you will find yourself using again and again. Perhaps the most important is calling one decision model from another –...