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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Saving and sharing your decision models using GitHub

You probably haven’t thought about it too much (other than the Ephemeral message in KIE Sandbox), but you’re currently saving decision models in local storage associated with your web browser. While this is great for getting started, it isn’t something we’d recommend for long-term use. What if your laptop gets lost—do you have a backup? How can you share decision models with a colleague? What if you realize you made a mistake and want to revert to the version you had 5 minutes ago? Local storage doesn’t easily let you do any of these things.

Luckily, the KIE Sandbox has a link to the best collaboration site available: GitHub. You may remember GitHub from Chapter 2 when we introduced the KIE and Drools projects, allowing many hundreds of developers to collaborate, share files, and navigate through different versions of their work.

GitHub has a private repository option that you can use...