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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

More nodes that you can use

We’ve already covered the nodes that you will use most often to model your decisions. But there are several other nodes worth exploring. Figure 4.15 showcases the different types of nodes available in KIE decision models:

Figure 4.15 – The different Decision Model nodes in KIE

Figure 4.15 – The different Decision Model nodes in KIE

Of all the nodes we see in Figure 4.15, we’ve already used Data and Decision nodes. But there are some other types that we’ll need soon:

  • Text nodes allow us to add comments to our Decision Models to explain what is going on. They are for information only and not evaluated.
  • Knowledge Source nodes also gives additional information but refers to an external source. For example, we might use a Knowledge Source to link to the document certifying which of our products are OK for each medical condition. They are for information only and are not evaluated.
  • Decision Services nodes help since our Decision Models can get...