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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

How deploying to the cloud makes things easier

If you’ve ever browsed a website, you’ve used the cloud. Some computer in a data center received your request and returned the web page you wanted. It doesn’t matter if that data center was in Iceland, Ireland, or Indonesia, so long as you have a network connection and clear protocols on how to talk to each other (that’s the http and www that you’re used to seeing in web links).

Most websites are read-only, or close to it, but what if you could request space in that data center and install an app into it, just like you do on your mobile phone? You’d then communicate with that newly installed app in the data center rather than your phone. That, in very simple terms, is the cloud.

Excel 365, the online version of Office, is an example. You’re unaware of the location of the data center that is hosting your document, but you are confident that Microsoft has all of the security checks to...