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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

Summary

This chapter bridged the Excel world that you were already familiar with and the world of AI, business rules, and decision services that you learned about in previous chapters. To do this, we did the following:

  • Introduced five different ways to link rules, AI, decision models, and Excel.
  • We learned about machine-readable web pages using REST and how to link to our decision service using Swagger – a more human-friendly link to Kogito decision services.
  • We called our product recommendation decision service using Power Query. The step-by-step examples we gave are a solution that you can expand on for your own work.

Even if you stopped reading this book now, you would already know how to untangle Excel spreadsheets and move business rules into an external decision service.

So what is left to cover in the second half of this book? We’ll cover techniques to do this in a better, faster, more flexible, and more scalable way. We’ll start...