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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Enterprise solutions

One core promise of this book is to build on your existing knowledge of Excel and help you find solutions that are more scalable, robust, and supported by a wider team. By this, we mean the following:

  • Scalable: Whatever we build can be used by tens or hundreds of users simultaneously, manipulating a very large dataset.
  • Robust/durable: What we build can be left to run by itself, since it won’t easily break and highlights any errors using tests that can be run automatically.
  • Supported by a wider team: Most Excel sheets are maintained by only one person. What if they leave? The solutions we build should be understood by many people.

Typically, these are called enterprise solutions. In your organization, you’re likely to have several of these, supported by an internal or external IT team. Let’s look at a couple of examples.

Examples of enterprise solutions

We gave an example before of a company using Excel to track...