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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Machine-readable web pages using REST

We’ve been talking about machine-readable web pages using REST and JSON as a common language.

REST stands for Representational State Transfer, which is another way of describing machine-readable web pages. Let’s take a look at what that looks like with a simple example, before exploring the Kogito REST API in more detail.

A simple REST example

REST uses a lot of the same infrastructure as browsing the web – so you can open a REST URL such as https://api.github.com/repos/OfficeDev/office-js using a web browser, like in Figure 6.2. This screenshot was taken using Firefox, as it colors the JSON for us, but Edge and Chrome will give you similar results. Note that a lot more information will be returned – we’ve edited the image for clarity.

Figure 6.2 – A simple REST call

Figure 6.2 – A simple REST call

This REST call gives you information about a project hosted on GitHub. From the URL, you can guess...