AI and Business Rule Engines for Excel Power Users: Capture and scale your business knowledge into the cloud – with Microsoft 365, Decision Models, and AI tools from IBM and Red Hat

What do you get with a Packt Subscription?

Free for first 7 days. $19.99 p/m after that. Cancel any time!

Unlimited ad-free access to the largest independent learning library in tech. Access this title and thousands more!

50+ new titles added per month, including many first-to-market concepts and exclusive early access to books as they are being written.

Innovative learning tools, including AI book assistants, code context explainers, and text-to-speech.

Thousands of reference materials covering every tech concept you need to stay up to date.

Subscribe now

View plans & pricing

Key benefits

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

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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

What do you get with a Packt Subscription?

Free for first 7 days. $19.99 p/m after that. Cancel any time!

Unlimited ad-free access to the largest independent learning library in tech. Access this title and thousands more!

50+ new titles added per month, including many first-to-market concepts and exclusive early access to books as they are being written.

Innovative learning tools, including AI book assistants, code context explainers, and text-to-speech.

Thousands of reference materials covering every tech concept you need to stay up to date.

Subscribe now

View plans & pricing

Frequently bought together

AI and Business Rule Engines for Excel Power Users

€26.99

Modern Generative AI with ChatGPT and OpenAI Models

€37.99

€26.99

Total € 91.97

FAQs

What is included in a Packt subscription?

A subscription provides you with full access to view all Packt and licnesed content online, this includes exclusive access to Early Access titles. Depending on the tier chosen you can also earn credits and discounts to use for owning content

How can I cancel my subscription?

To cancel your subscription with us simply go to the account page - found in the top right of the page or at https://subscription.packtpub.com/my-account/subscription - From here you will see the ‘cancel subscription’ button in the grey box with your subscription information in.

What are credits?

Credits can be earned from reading 40 section of any title within the payment cycle - a month starting from the day of subscription payment. You also earn a Credit every month if you subscribe to our annual or 18 month plans. Credits can be used to buy books DRM free, the same way that you would pay for a book. Your credits can be found in the subscription homepage - subscription.packtpub.com - clicking on ‘the my’ library dropdown and selecting ‘credits’.

What happens if an Early Access Course is cancelled?

Projects are rarely cancelled, but sometimes it's unavoidable. If an Early Access course is cancelled or excessively delayed, you can exchange your purchase for another course. For further details, please contact us here.

Where can I send feedback about an Early Access title?

If you have any feedback about the product you're reading, or Early Access in general, then please fill out a contact form here and we'll make sure the feedback gets to the right team.

Can I download the code files for Early Access titles?

We try to ensure that all books in Early Access have code available to use, download, and fork on GitHub. This helps us be more agile in the development of the book, and helps keep the often changing code base of new versions and new technologies as up to date as possible. Unfortunately, however, there will be rare cases when it is not possible for us to have downloadable code samples available until publication.

When we publish the book, the code files will also be available to download from the Packt website.

How accurate is the publication date?

The publication date is as accurate as we can be at any point in the project. Unfortunately, delays can happen. Often those delays are out of our control, such as changes to the technology code base or delays in the tech release. We do our best to give you an accurate estimate of the publication date at any given time, and as more chapters are delivered, the more accurate the delivery date will become.

How will I know when new chapters are ready?

We'll let you know every time there has been an update to a course that you've bought in Early Access. You'll get an email to let you know there has been a new chapter, or a change to a previous chapter. The new chapters are automatically added to your account, so you can also check back there any time you're ready and download or read them online.

I am a Packt subscriber, do I get Early Access?

Yes, all Early Access content is fully available through your subscription. You will need to have a paid for or active trial subscription in order to access all titles.

How is Early Access delivered?

Early Access is currently only available as a PDF or through our online reader. As we make changes or add new chapters, the files in your Packt account will be updated so you can download them again or view them online immediately.

How do I buy Early Access content?

Early Access is a way of us getting our content to you quicker, but the method of buying the Early Access course is still the same. Just find the course you want to buy, go through the check-out steps, and you’ll get a confirmation email from us with information and a link to the relevant Early Access courses.

What is Early Access?

Keeping up to date with the latest technology is difficult; new versions, new frameworks, new techniques. This feature gives you a head-start to our content, as it's being created. With Early Access you'll receive each chapter as it's written, and get regular updates throughout the product's development, as well as the final course as soon as it's ready.We created Early Access as a means of giving you the information you need, as soon as it's available. As we go through the process of developing a course, 99% of it can be ready but we can't publish until that last 1% falls in to place. Early Access helps to unlock the potential of our content early, to help you start your learning when you need it most. You not only get access to every chapter as it's delivered, edited, and updated, but you'll also get the finalized, DRM-free product to download in any format you want when it's published. As a member of Packt, you'll also be eligible for our exclusive offers, including a free course every day, and discounts on new and popular titles.

Filter reviews by

All

Amazon verified reviews

Ruairi O'hAilin May 23, 2023

I found this an excellent introduction to the world of business rules and their real-world implementation in the world’s favourite analysis platform (Excel:-!). The author takes on a methodical journey through the building blocks - layer by layer, and manages to assume nothing while maintaining a light-hearted conversational style. It felt like having a friendly mentor or guide along for the journey. The book is up to date and goes into the Microsoft Power platform and Office Script as well as the open source and commercial rules platforms available and finishes with an an exploration of future use cases.

Amazon Verified review

Howard Swerdloff May 14, 2024

Having spent my entire career working in Enterprise software sales, it is rare to find a book that tells you why you are doing something technical or what you are trying to solve for the business / organization. This book does just that. Starting with why we use Excel, how it is central to organizations, but leaves gaps in solving pain points, it moves into what AI is, how AI can create rules to solve real world problems, and the different methods that have been tried to date (coding, macros, etc.)The author does a good job presenting several tools that can be used and makes a case for his choice of tools. From there, developing the team and understanding what each person does helps break down the way AI application works in the real world. Starting with a single rule and building on the level of complexity helps to provide the path forward to learn and apply AI within Excel. Being able to download all the code examples is also a great timesaver if you do have something that doesn't work exactly as described.Overall, great book and I highly recommend it.

Amazon Customer Jan 01, 2024

The title got me curious. Often, we hear that Excel is about to die. Yet, the title “AI and Business Rule Engines for Excel Power Users” puts Excel in the vortex of the latest technology.Reading the Table of Contents made me more curious and excited to read the book. I am an Excel Power user who has developed many custom solutions for companies in various business industries. This book takes the power of Excel to another level, teaching us how to take advantage of it and other Microsoft technologies to set business rules and automate business procedures.This book is very well-written. In easy language, the author explains how companies deal with developing applications to address their business needs and the challenges they face to maintain and evolve those applications.Paul Browne explores our many options with Excel (Tables, VBA, Power Query, Office Scripts, Power Automate, Python and more) and how to integrate those with AI tools and Business Rule Engines to create solid and trustable Enterprise Solutions. The author also explains several approaches and options when selecting and testing the tools to work with.All the fundamental concepts, such as business rules and decision models, are explained, as well as how to build, deploy, share, and later scale them, including several options and approaches, from the free ones that allow the user to learn, explore and test to the more robust ones for when the business is ready to invest and commit to more resources.I think there is nothing left to be put in by the author. He takes the reader by their hand, explains all the options and concepts they need to know, and guides them, step by step, on how to put all the pieces of a Business Rule Engine together. All that is left is on the reader’s side to put in the decision, the time and the effort to learn and develop the solutions they need for their businesses.

Marguerite Gaynor Jul 19, 2023

found this book an excellent guide on how to take my knowledge of excel to the next level. The book itself is helpful throughout and is an excellent tool to induce features which are both new to me and as a reference when I am trying to remember how to do something again.

PJ Ryan May 25, 2023

As someone working on Excel daily both for work and community , I though I knew a lot on Excel & VBA, but this book at opened my eyes to a whole new world, while I am not finished yet, I have learned so much more about excel and data, My journey is only is only 1/2 way so I will update you more when I read more, but if you are into Excel and want expand your skills, please get this book !

AI and Business Rule Engines for Excel Power Users: Capture and scale your business knowledge into the cloud – with Microsoft 365, Decision Models, and AI tools from IBM and Red Hat

What do you get with a Packt Subscription?