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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

OpenShift – Red Hat’s piece of the cloud

Red Hat’s (IBM) cloud offering is called OpenShift. It’s full-featured, meaning it can do most of the things the other major cloud vendors such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft offer. While it is possible to deploy Kogito to these other cloud vendors, we’re choosing OpenShift as it offers an easy one-click deployment for Kogito and our decision models.

Being full-featured also means OpenShift has a lot of buttons that we don’t need to cover in this book; we’re going to ignore those and focus on what you need to deploy your decision models. If you feel the need to learn more, we can recommend OpenShift for the Absolute Beginner from Packt at https://www.packtpub.com/product/openshift-for-the-absolute-beginner-hands-on-video/9781838559090.

OpenShift has a free layer called the Developer Sandbox (not to be confused with the KIE Sandbox). This allows you to try out the deployment with the option...