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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Red Piranha as a template enterprise project

The main focus of this book is to show you as an Excel power user how to leverage the power of a business rules engine. That gives you a workable solution, but it is likely that your decision models will sooner or later be deployed as part of a larger enterprise system. That’s a good thing! Remember the full enterprise system diagram we saw back in Chapter 2? Your decision models won’t need to change, but now they will have a more robust infrastructure around them.

As an Excel power user or business rules author, you don’t need to know the full detail of how to do this. But since you’re investing your time in this area, it is very reassuring to see how it can be done. The section will show you a working example of such an enterprise system using the Red Piranha project.

Before we start, we have two other reasons for introducing the Red Piranha project:

  • Red Piranha shows you another way of integrating...