By Ken Levine. Heres a Friday Question that became an entire post. I know the WGA has seminars on this and some colleges offer courses in this, but the following points are pretty much everything you need to know. Reminder Whenever I cant think of an appropriate picture I always post Natalie Wood photos. The question is from Brian Hennessy. Hey Ken can I ask you what are mistakes that first time showrunners make Not communicating with your staff. Its not enough to have your vision for the show you need to clearly share it with your other writers. Dont just assume. Itll be hard enough for them without trying to figure out whats in your head. Same is true with your editor and directors. Be very organized. Time will go by much faster than you think. From day one lay out a plan. You want so many outlines by this date, so many first drafts by that date, etc. Dont squander that period before production begins. Its easy to knock off early or move meetings back. But this is golden time before the crunch when actors arrive, cameras roll, and a thousand additional details require your attention. Accept the fact that the first draft of the first script you receive from every staff member will look like a script from the last show they were on. It will take them time to adapt to your show. Remember that every writer is not a five tool player as they say in baseball. By that I mean, some may be strong at story but not jokes, or punch up but not drafts. Not everybody is good at everything. Consider that when putting together your staff. Hire the best writers not your best friends. Hire at least one experienced writer. Otherwise, on top of everything else youre doing, youre re inventing the wheel. Dont show favoritism to some writers over others. It destroys morale and no one loves a teachers pet. Pick your fights with the network and studio. Dont go to war over every little note. Antagonizing everyone all the time is a good way to ensure this will be your only showrunning gig. Yes, youre an artist and youre trying to protect your vision. Everybody Loves Raymond Scripts' title='Everybody Loves Raymond Scripts' />Test your knowledge with amazing and interesting facts, trivia, quizzes, and brain teaser games on MentalFloss. Posts about NotSoSpecial Agent Cooper written by LizzieB90. I was thinking a couple of days ago about the new wave of systems languages now challenging C for its place at the top of the systemsprogramming heap Go and Rust. Everybody Loves Raymond Scripts' title='Everybody Loves Raymond Scripts' />And yes, a lot of the notes are moronic, but you have to hear them out. You have to consider them. Filezilla 3.1.6 (Ftp Client)'>Filezilla 3.1.6 (Ftp Client). You have to do the ones you can live with. The best way to get your way is to get them on your side. Dont overwork your staff. This goes back to being organized. Theres only so many times you can whip the same horse. Your people are dedicated to the show but not to the extent you are. Theyre not getting any back end deals. Theyre not getting interviewed by ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY. This show may be your whole life but they want to go home. Praise your staff. If they turn in a good draft, let em know. This sounds like such a simple thing but youd be surprised how many showrunners dont do it. Respect the crew and learn their names. When you walk onto the set, greet them. Theyre not just a bunch of convicts picking up litter along the side of the expressway. Theyre dedicated highly trained professionals who never get any recognition. Take the time to know who they are. Take care of yourself. On the weekends get plenty of sleep. Eat right. Relax. Its a long haul. Never make your staff work late nights if youre not there with them. Dont get so caught up in the work and the grind that you forget to have some fun. Youre running your own show. Thats a rare opportunity. Enjoy it or at least as much as you can before you have to put out another fire. A good way to completely destroy any morale is to automatically put your name on every script and share credit with every writer. You may win in arbitration but you lose your troops. The trade off is not worth it. Youre getting paid more money than anybody already. Let your writers receive full credit and residuals. Accept responsibility. F1 2002 Mod 1995 Games. When things go wrong and they will ultimately youre the one in charge. Not saying you cant make changes in personnel if someone doesnt work out, but dont be constantly playing the blame game. Youre the showrunner. You take the hit. On the other hand, dont take all the credit. When ideas and scripts and jokes come from other people, publicly acknowledge their contribution. The bottom line is a showrunner has to develop people skills and management skills as well as writing skills. You may have enormous talent but that will do you no good when your staff firebombs your car with you in it. Good luck. The work is hard but the rewards are enormous. Wasnt Natalie gorgeousUsing ADO to Query an Excel Spreadsheet. Welcome to Office Space, the column that offers tips and tricks for scripting Microsoft Office applications. Well post new tips every Tuesday and Thursday to see an archive of previous tips, visit the Office Space Archive. And if you have particular questions about Microsoft Office scripting, feel free to send them to scriptermicrosoft. English, if possible. We cant promise to answer all the questions we receive, but well do our best. Using ADO to Query an Excel Spreadsheet. A month or so ago CBS aired the final episode of the beloved sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, a show that had been ranked No. Scripting Guys never caught even the briefest glimpse of the program. Of course, cultural literacy isnt exactly this Scripting Guys forte hes never seen American Idol or Survivor either, and has absolutely no idea which one is Nelly and which one is P Diddy. With Raymond gone CBS has a void to fill in its schedule, but the rest of the world has an empty spot to fill as well now who are we all supposed to love Personally, wed like to nominate Microsoft Excel as a candidate to fill that void. After all, whats not to love about Excel Do you need a traditional spreadsheet program, something that can help you with budgets, accounting and other financial type thingsExcel can do that. Do you need to make charts and graphs Excel can do that. Create an organizational chart Calculate statistics Excel has you covered Excel can do anything. Of course, some of you might not be convinced of that. Excel can do anything you muse. Well, how about this can Excel function as a flat file databaseCan you use ADO to access the information found in an Excel spreadsheet Can you send SQL queries to Excel and get back informationWell put it this way the Office Space column is published on the Internet, and obviously something couldnt be published on the Internet if it wasnt 1. Of course Excel can function as a flat file database that can be accessed using ADO and SQL queries. And in todays column well explain how to do just that. Lets take a look at a very simple spreadsheet and then explain how we can access the data using ADO Active. X Data Objects. Heres a rudimentary spreadsheet named C ScriptsTest. Name, the other labeled Number. To better ensure that your database queries work against an Excel spreadsheet, make sure your spreadsheets are set up in a similar fashion that is, make row 1 a header row, start the data itself in row 2, and dont skip any rows or columns. And to make coding easier, dont include blank spaces in your headers for example, use a column header like Social. Security. Number and dont use a column header like Social Security Number. It just makes life much easier. Incidentally, thats true when using any kind of database, not just Excel. Heres what our spreadsheet looks like And, yes, we did put a lot of time and effort into creating this sample spreadsheet. All part of the service we offer. But now for the big question how do we access this data using ADOWell, one way is to use a script that looks like this. On Error Resume Next. Const ad. Open. Static 3. Const ad. Lock. Optimistic 3. Const ad. Cmd. Text H0. Set obj. Connection Create. ObjectADODB. Connection. Set obj. Record. Set Create. ObjectADODB. Recordset. Connection. Open ProviderMicrosoft. Jet. OLEDB. 4. 0. Data SourceC ScriptsTest. Extended PropertiesExcel 8. HDRYes. obj. Recordset. Open Select FROM Sheet. Connection, ad. Open. Static, ad. Lock. Optimistic, ad. Cmd. Text. Do Until obj. Recordset. EOF. Wscript. Echo obj. Recordset. Fields. ItemName,. Recordset. Fields. ItemNumber. obj. Recordset. Move. Next. We should probably start by pointing out that the first half of the script simply defines some constants and creates the two objects ADODB. Connection and ADODB. Recordset that are required to connect to and retrieve data from a data source. This is largely boilerplate code that you use as is in any ADO script. And because this is boilerplate you can use as is we wont discuss the first half of the script in any detail for more information you might take a look at the Working with Databases section of the Microsoft Windows 2. Scripting Guide. Well begin our discussion with this bit of code, which actually opens a connection to the Excel spreadsheet. Connection. Open ProviderMicrosoft. Jet. OLEDB. 4. 0. Data SourceC ScriptsTest. Extended PropertiesExcel 8. HDRYes. Again, this is largely boilerplate code. The only section you need to worry about is the Data Source, where you specify the path to your spreadsheet. Note. What if the path to your spreadsheet includes spaces, something that can cause problems for ADO scripts working with text files for more information, see this Hey, Scripting Guy In this case, theres no problem whatsoever just write out the entire file path, spaces and all. Data SourceC ScriptsMy Spreadsheet. Incidentally, you should resist the temptation to change Excel 8. Excel you happen to be running on your machine. In this case the Excel 8. Excel but to the ADO provider used to access Excel. Leave the provider as Excel 8. As long as were on the subject we should also mention that the code HDRYes simply indicates that our spreadsheet has a header row if our spreadsheet didnt have a header row wed set HDR to No. But seeing as how we said you should always have a header row and seeing as how people always do what the Scripting Guys tell them to, well, this is a moot point. After making a connection to the data source we can use a SQL query to retrieve the information stored in that data source. Heres the code we use to return a recordset consisting of all the rows in the spreadsheet. Recordset. Open Select FROM Sheet. Connection, ad. Open. Static, ad. Lock. Optimistic, ad. Cmd. Text. Again, theres a lot of ADO boilerplate in here the only part were really concerned about for now is the actual SQL query This is a standard SQL query, one that selects all the fields columns in the database worksheet. Notice that we specify the name of an individual worksheet in the query, the same way that we would specify an individual table name were we connecting to a database. Notice, too, that the worksheet name is enclosed in square brackets and that the actual name Sheet. Make sure you do both those things when writing your own ADO scripts for accessing data in a spreadsheet. The recordset returned to us is exactly the same sort of thing wed get back were we making a connection to, say SQL Server. Because of that we can use these lines of code to simply report back the Name and Number for each record in the recordset, something that corresponds to each row in our spreadsheet. Do Until obj. Recordset. EOF. Wscript. Echo obj. Recordset. Fields. ItemName,. obj. Recordset. Fields. ItemNumber. Recordset. Move. Next. When we run the script we should get back a report that looks like this Yes, very cool, but some of you are skeptical after all, couldnt we retrieve this same information using a plain old Excel script Yes, we could, which means that in this case, theres really no reason to use ADO at all.