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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

How KIE being open source helps you

In some ways, Excel spreadsheets (the file, not the Microsoft program) have their source open for viewing. Since most spreadsheet files aren’t password protected, if you have a copy of somebody else’s spreadsheet, you can often open it and learn how it works.

Within reason (for example, if you work at the same company as the creator), you can update the Excel sheet and make it even better. This is useful, for example, when the original author has left the company and the sheet is vital to keep the business running.

Open source means that you have all the details of the software design available to you, instead of just downloading the end product as a binary file that you cannot change. It means that you can modify, build, and run the software both now and in the future – even if the original vendor goes out of business.

Open source is supported by a set of tools to allow the easy sharing and building of these source...