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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Part 2: Writing Business Rules and Decision Models – with Real-Life Examples

This section builds on the Hello world example we saw earlier, working with colleagues to build useful business rules and decision models and linking them back to Excel for day-to-day use.

This section includes the following chapters:

  • Chapter 4, More Decision Models, Business Rules, and Decision Tables, expands your knowledge of decision models, building out a working chocolate shop example to show more of the tools available.
  • Chapter 5, Sharing and Deploying Decision Models Using OpenShift Cloud and GitHub, makes our decision models sharable, allowing other people to run them in the cloud, and looks at using online tools to collaborate with colleagues on the model’s design.
  • Chapter 6, Calling Business Rules from Excel Using Power Query, links Excel to our AI, rules, and decision tables – using the Power Query tool built into Excel.