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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Important notes on the OpenShift Developer Sandbox

The OpenShift Developer Sandbox is great because it is free (you can try before you buy) yet has most of the substantial features of the full-featured cloud offering. However, you need to remember a couple of limitations of the free version:

  • Tokens need to be renewed daily. This means you need to (re)link OpenShift and KIE Sandbox using the instructions in the previous section. It’s not onerous, but you need to remember to do it, or the sandbox will give you an error.
  • The Developer Sandbox needs to be renewed every 30 days, and prior to this renewal, everything within OpenShift data will be deleted. This isn’t a problem since you will always have a local copy of your decision model, and you shouldn’t be storing any data in your models in the sandbox.
  • By default, any model you deploy to OpenShift is public access. This is great for sharing the link with colleagues for them to test out, but you may...