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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

What’s your real business problem?

We talked earlier about Excel being the engine room of many businesses. Somebody (a client or an employer) pays you to use it for a reason. The knowledge you have embedded in your spreadsheets helps the business save money or make more sales. If you work with an organization that saves lives, the knowledge you have embedded in your spreadsheets could get people the right medicine at the right time.

The knowledge you have embedded is the important part. Spreadsheets are just convenient tools to capture and share that knowledge. Since most businesses have intense (and growing) competition, how well you capture and manage that knowledge dictates whether your business will survive and grow or shrink and close in the coming years.

Spreadsheets are convenient tools, but they are not perfect. In fact, if your organization relies heavily on Excel, it is likely that most people haven’t (yet) thought about how to capture and maintain the...