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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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 in a name – KIE, Kogito, or Drools?

In this chapter, we’ve used the terms KIE, Drools, and Kogito almost as if they were the same project. While the three projects work very closely together, it’s useful to note that there are fundamental differences:

  • The original business rules community project is Drools. While it is possible to interact directly with Drools (and many advanced projects do so), we take the easier approach of using the tools provided by KIE. The Drools home page can be found at https://www.drools.org/.
  • KIE (or Knowledge is Everything) is the umbrella project of which Drools is now part. For example, it provides KIE Sandbox, which we’ll use to edit rules and decision models starting in Chapter 3. It also provides other knowledge management tools, such as integrating machine learning and rules, which we’ll cover in Chapter 11. The KIE home page can be found at https://www.kie.org/.
  • The Kogito project empowers...