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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Containers supporting Kogito, KIE, and Drools

This book focuses on rule engines. But it is also a key aim of the book to help you on the journey from using Excel-based solutions (running on your desktop) to more powerful enterprise solutions that can be used by many people at once. Containers make this journey easier, so let’s take a quick look at what the technology is and how we will use it.

Do I really need to learn about containers?

The quick answer is no. This is a book about Excel and the Kogito/Drools rule engine, and you’ll get value in your day-to-day work even if you just focus on those areas.

But a likely outcome is that other people will be interested in what you have done and will want to contribute to and/or run your business rules. Container technologies help you collaborate and deploy your rules more effectively.

In some ways, you’ve already used something similar to containers when you’ve used Excel. For most spreadsheets, you...