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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Executing combined rules and machine learning models

At the end of Chapter 11, we set out four different ways to execute combined business rules and machine learning models in KIE. There are good reasons for wanting to explore the different options, so we’ll cover three of them in the following order:

  1. We’ll first explore the method that comes with the KIE samples, since these official examples are the most robust. Having some technical knowledge makes this method easier.
  2. As a side note, we look at an approach using Business Central. It might be easier for a smaller group of people. While Business Central is a user-friendly tool, it works better for users who can draw on technical and enterprise support.
  3. Finally, we propose a method suitable for people who are looking for the most practical solution. Combining Power Automate and Python is the method most accessible now to Excel power users.

Of course, if the fourth method (the execution of combined...