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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Advanced DRL rules in VS Code and Business Central

When we first introduced business rules in Chapter 1, we used a slightly formal when …. then format – when something is true, then do this action. The rule in our Red Piranha example in Figure 12.11 follows this format exactly:

  • When a Cell object is marked as unmodified
  • Then update the status flag to modified/print a message to the console

So, the basic format is simple and very human-readable. There is a lot of power available when writing individual rules this way, and DRL files can be mixed and matched with the decision models that we’ve been using for most of this book.

Each line in a decision table is equivalent to one DRL rule

We described decision tables as having columns equivalent to when (conditions) and columns that activate when matched (then, on the right-hand side of a decision table). So, you can think of each line of a decision table as being equivalent to one rule in a...