AI and Business Rule Engines for Excel Power Users

A power-packed manual to enhance your decision-making with the application of Business Rules using KIE, Drools, Kogito, MS Excel, Power Automate, Office Script, and MS Forms

Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free PDF eBook

Key Features
Explore the business rule tools by implementing real-world examples to write sophisticated rules
Discover how decision services solve current business challenges using AI
Combine rules with workflows and scripting to deploy a cloud-based production environment
Book Description
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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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.

What you will learn
Use KIE and Drools decision services to write AI-based business rules
Link Business Rules to Excel using Power Query, Script Lab, Office Script, and VBA
Build an end-to-end workflow with Microsoft Power Automate and Forms while integrating it with Excel and Kogito
Collaborate on and deploy your decision models using OpenShift, Azure, and GitHub
Discover advanced editing using the graphical Decision Model Notation (DMN) and testing tools
Use Kogito to combine AI solutions with Excel
Who this book is for
This book is for Excel power users, business users, and business analysts looking for a tool to capture their knowledge and deploy it as part of enterprise-grade systems. Working proficiency with MS Excel is required. Basic knowledge of web technologies and scripting would be an added advantage.

Table of Contents
Wrestling with Excel? You Are Not Alone
Choosing an AI and Business Rules Engine – Why Drools and KIE?
Your First Business Rule with the Online KIE Sandbox
More Decision Models, Business Rules, and Decision Tables
Sharing and Deploying Decision Models Using OpenShift and GitHub
Calling Business Rules from Excel Using Power Query
Using Business Rules in Excel with Visual Basic, Script Lab, or Office Scripts
Using AI and Decision Services Within Power Automate Workflows
Advanced Expressions, Decision Models, and Testing
Scaling Rules in Business Central with Docker and the Cloud
Rules-Based AI and Machine Learning AI – Combining the Best of Both
What Next? A Look inside Neural Networks, Enterprise Projects, Advanced Rules, and the Rule Engine
Appendix A, Introduction to Visual Basic for Applications
Appendix B, Testing Using VSCode, Azure, and GitHub Codespaces
Appendix C, Troubleshooting Docker