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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Calling the decision service using Power Query

We explained earlier that Power Query allows you to connect Excel to a wide range of data sources. We’ll focus in the next section on using it to connect to the decision service REST API. But if you are curious about what else it can do, I’d encourage you to check out the Power Query and related Power BI series from Packt: https://subscription.packtpub.com/expert-reading-lists/power-bi-for-business-intelligence-beginner-to-advanced.

Connecting Excel via Power Query takes lots of simple steps that we will cover one by one: a simple REST call, passing in parameters, and a more advanced POST call, before combining them to link Excel and our decision service.

A simple Power Query REST example

We’re going to work through the most simple Power Query call to an external API possible – the GitHub API we encountered earlier at https://api.github.com/repos/OfficeDev/office-js.

This a GET call, with no parameters...