Summary

In this chapter, you learned that you are not alone in your frustrations with Excel, but that it is far too important of a tool to abandon. We looked at enterprise solutions that can solve some of the problems you are facing, but often these have an overly large gap to bridge before they are useful to you. Trying to bridge this gap, we looked at the core business problems we might use Excel for and discovered that AI, and in particular a rules-based approach, might be able to help.

One good surprise is that business rules are very familiar, and we might have used them already without knowing it. We discovered that Excel is actually a much more powerful tool than we give it credit for and that we don’t need to fully replace it, just upgrade certain parts – if we aren’t afraid to delve under the bonnet. We also mentioned that while other solutions are available, an approach based on business rules is a good investment since it has a large element of future...