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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Your First Business Rule with the Online KIE Sandbox

In the first two chapters of this book, we looked at the problems that you often face when working with Excel, and how AI tools such as rule engines (in particular, KIE and Drools) can help solve them. But this is a practical book, so it’s about time we got hands-on and showed you how to write rules using the online KIE tools.

In this chapter, we’ll write our first business rule – a variation on the classic Hello World. We’ll use the KIE Sandbox Extended Services to allow us to run the rules we write in the online editor. We’ll introduce Decision Models as a visual format for capturing decisions and business rules and begin to expand our first rule so we can glimpse the power of the rules-based approach. Finally, we’ll explore other elements of the KIE Sandbox user interface, so we’ll have a good foundation for the more sophisticated rules we’ll write later on.

The following...