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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

KIE Sandbox Extended Services

Excel is very convenient – it bundles the application to edit and execute your formulas into one package. Most enterprise software (including KIE/Drools) split these into separate steps – you edit the rules in one tool, and then make a conscious decision to execute them, often using a separate software package. While a bit more work, it does mean that you don’t accidentally break something when editing, which makes your rules solution more robust.

So far in this chapter, we’ve been using the online KIE editor. But we need a way to execute our decisions and rules. For that, we need KIE Sandbox Extended Services.

Browsers have come a long way in the last 20 years – to the point that it’s easy to forget that the KIE Sandbox editor isn’t a native desktop app. While tools such as WebAssembly have the potential to make the experience smoother in the future, it is difficult to make a complex, enterprise-grade...