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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Running the Business Central rule editor in Docker

Since we’ve set up Docker, let’s use it to run the first of the images provided by the KIE team. It’s as simple as running our Hello World example. And while there is a bit of careful typing needed in step 2, we only need to do it once because after that, it’s set up in Docker Desktop:

  1. Open Command Prompt by pressing press Windows Key + R, then type cmd.
  2. In the console, type docker run -p 8080:8080 -p 8001:8001 -d --name business-central quay.io/kiegroup/business-central-workbench-showcase:latest, paying special attention to the spelling.
  3. Docker will spend several minutes downloading and extracting the necessary layers, as shown in Figure 10.6:
Figure 10.6 – Docker downloading the layers in the Business Central image

Figure 10.6 – Docker downloading the layers in the Business Central image

  1. After Command Prompt has finished updating, take a look at the Docker Desktop Containers tab. It should show Business Central running...