I've used Keras to mostly automate ANNs and then drop the trained models into TensorFlow Android. I wouldnt classify it as easy. However, it used to take months to do this, nowadays it takes days to do it. Still incredibly painful and mostly an undocumented black-art.

If one wants to start from zero experience of Neural Networks, but expertise in application development process, what resources would you recommend to start learning?

Ng's deeplearning.ai is good for getting a solid background in how it all works. If you want to just jump into building things, I'd highly recommend http://course.fast.ai.

The fast.ai courses are designed for engineering people coming to ML. They are excellent.

I you're looking to learn about the maths behind neural nets and really understand how they work I'd recommend Andrew Ng's deeplearning.ai course. Starts from scratch and will give you a deep understanding when you're done.

I'm mostly looking for something like "excel for ANN"

Do you mean 'Excel for solving machine learning problems' or do actually want to design ANN architectures with an Excel-like tool?

If the second case, have you ever done that task without it?

Because while there are pain points (eg, keeping track of the shape of your data) there seems to be a lot more critical problems to fix than that.

Ok - excel for not ANN gets tricky when you have many rows (like 10^6) most of the tricky business with ANN is when you have >10^8 rows of data. Why is it that doing this with an excel type tool will be good?

> "excel for ANN"

I think this won't work well - blindly using a complex tool that has many hyperparameters you don't care about.

I'm working on exactly this, I'd love to chat about your needs from such a tool - drop me an email (see my profile)