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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Why are rule engines and decision models so fast?

From experience, several times, I've seen business users propose using a rule engine to the IT development team. The IT folks mistakenly think they’ve learned about them on their college course (hint, they may use the term state machine) before attempting to build one themselves. Several months later, they have a half-working solution, good enough to solve the immediate problem, but cut off from all the mainstream tooling as KIE continues to evolve and improve.

It is for that reason that we have given you (and colleagues) a glimpse within the rule engine and show the sophistication that almost 20 years of continual development gives you. Let's summarize why we should use KIE instead of a home-grown solution:

  • Developers – you want to use KIE as the cutting-edge AI tool from Red Hat and IBM. That looks far better on your CV than building your own.
  • Business users – you want to get the benefit...