Scott Lyerly

Excel Geeking: Using VBA And ADO To Change Data to SharePoint Lists

June 26th, 2014
I don’t get a ton of hits on this blog. But for the hits I do get, most them are focused on the Excel stuff. And of the Excel stuff, one of the most popular is Using VBA and ADO To Pull Data From SharePoint Lists. Because of this, I felt the need for a follow-up post, a sequel as it were. In the first post, I laid out the basic code to pull data from SharePoint using VBA. Could I do the same this to push data to SharePoint?

The short answer is no.

This proved to be an interesting topic to research. There actually isn’t a lot of material written on how to use SQL, ADO, and VBA to change data in a SharePoint list. Plenty of posts on pulling data, it’s a pretty basic SELECT statement. Fair less on things like INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE.

I started off taking the VBA from the previous post and modifying it so that it would become one of the other three. As a matter of public disclosure, I should note that I only tried this with INSERT and DELETE. I didn’t try it with UPDATE, largely because I’ve never been a big fan of UDPATE. I find it less troublesome to use DELETE/INSERT with databases, with the DELETE containing criteria managed by a WHERE clause, than I do trying to find the right keys to isolate the correct record and then fire off an UPDATE query. This probably makes me a lazy coder, but given that I’m not a DBA, when it comes to databases I’m usually flying by the seat of my pants and using Google as my flight instruction manual.

Okay, so here is the code I tried:
```
Public Const sDEMAND_ROLE_GUID As String = "InsertYourGuidHere"

Public Const sSHAREPOINT_SITE As String = "https://yoursharepointsite.sharepoint.com/agsinwhateveryoursiteis/"


Sub TestDeleteFromSharepoint()


Dim cn As ADODB.Connection

Dim sConn As String

Dim sSQL As String


sConn = "Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;WSS;IMEX=1;RetrieveIds=Yes;" & _

" DATABASE=" & sSHAREPOINT_SITE & ";" & _

"LIST=" & sDEMAND_ROLE_GUID & " ;"


Set cn = New ADODB.Connection


sSQL = "DELETE * FROM [Demand Role] as tbl WHERE tbl.[Role]='BA';"

&amp;nbsp;

With cn

.ConnectionString = sConn

.Open

.Execute sSQL, , adCmdText

.Close

End With

Set cn = Nothing

End Sub
```
And the result:

What about INSERT INTO?
```
Sub TestInsetIntoSharepoint()

&amp;nbsp;

Dim cn As ADODB.Connection

Dim sConn As String

Dim sSQL As String


sConn = "Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;WSS;IMEX=1;RetrieveIds=Yes;" & _

" DATABASE=" & sSHAREPOINT_SITE & ";" & _

"LIST=" & sDEMAND_ROLE_GUID & " ;"

Set cn = New ADODB.Connection


sSQL = "INSERT INTO [Demand Role] ([Role]) VALUES ('BA');"


With cn

.ConnectionString = sConn

.Open

.Execute sSQL, , adCmdText

.Close

End With

Set cn = Nothing

End Sub

&amp;nbsp;
```
And the result:

Based on the results above, you would think the long answer to this is idea of changing SharePoint data using VBA would be a flat no as well, right? Well, it’s kind of no. But kind of yes.

Here’s the thing with SharePoint lists: you link them to Access as tables. It’s incredibly simple to do. In Access, you go to External Data, use the drop down to choose SharePoint Lists, plug in your SharePoint site and click Next. Access will go out to SharePoint, get the available lists, and present them to you in a dialog box where you can choose whichever table you want. Once you choose the table and finish out the connection, you have a linked table in Access from SharePoint in which you can update data.

I’ll say that again. You can update your data in Access, and it updates in the SharePoint list.

Which makes the long answer less yes and no and more “kinda”. Because, while you can’t update the SharePoint list in SharePoint directly with VBA, you can certainly update the linked table in Access using VBA. But this begs the question: why? Why would you have your data resident in a SharePoint list and linked into an Access database? Why not just have it in Access? This is a question I can’t answer, maybe somebody out there wiser than I can. But for now, without going into all the nitty-gritty details about how to do it, this is the setup you need to have in order to update a SharePoint list using Excel VBA and ADO.
The Maffetone Method – Month 8

June 7th, 2014

May sucked.

Okay, now that we have that out of the way let’s take a look at the artwork:

As you can see, my average pace climbed way back up from where it was in April. There’s a pretty simple explanation for that: I had a lousy time running.

If you read Phil Maffetone’s “The Big Book of Endurance Training and Racing“, then you know that proper endurance training is comprised of three different pieces: the structural (training) part, the chemical (eating) part, and the mental part. My biggest problem wasn’t the structural part, although that wasn’t stellar. I only went on seven runs in a 31 day month. My total mileage for the month was all of 26 miles. Structurally, this wasn’t very sound.

Pace was way up whenever I went out for a run. And by up I mean down. Or however you might say it. You know what I mean. The pace that I set in April as an average was lower than the piece that I sent May. I don’t know if that’s supposed to be up or down but you get the drift. A large contributor to this slower pace was the chemical part. I ate like crap last month. I ate whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. Our admin assistant at work has giant bags of candy lying around. Anybody’s welcome to them. Oh, and I did help myself. My weight was up 5 pounds, my sleep was way way off, and I generally felt like crap.

But while chemical was certainly part of the problem, it was what drove the chemical that was the real problem. Maffetone explains that the triangle that makes up endurance training is comprised of these three things equally. And under the mental side of the triangle exists stress. How stressed you are and how well you manage it is a huge contributor to whether your training well. I cannot tell a lie, work has been very stressful recently. Lot of changes, lot of things up in the air, ergo a lot of stress. With the stress, which has led to lousy nights’ sleep, and with the mental side of that triangle being so weak recently, I just haven’t had the interest in running.

I knew I was having trouble with running recently. I mentioned it previously here, as well as what I was most concerned about: loss of conditioning. I think, in reviewing May’s numbers, and in seeing how June has started out, a loss of conditioning has definitely happened. But the truth is, I just haven’t had the drive, the desire to go out and run. The alarm clock goes off and I think “Sleep. Sleep is way better than running right now.” And with that, I slap the snooze button and roll over. What’s interesting is I’m not the only one. I good friend of mine who is also a runner, a really serious runner, said to me just yesterday “I’ve lost interest.” He’s still running, but he’s got to push himself to do it.

So what to do and where to go with this? In my mind, there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do but to keep pushing forward. I view this training program of Phil Maffetone’s as a grand experiment, a chance to see if, by applying his principles, I can make myself go faster and faster still while avoiding injury and keeping my stamina up and my heart rate down. Can I become a competitive runner? So onward I go. The Maffetone Method is not a quick method. It’s not a two month training program that gets you to the result you want. It’s not Couch to 5K app on your iPhone that gets you to run a 5K in eight weeks. It’s a serious training program that can take a few years for the results to be truly remarkable. And you have to apply all the principles, not just the ones you want. So in addition to actually running, I have to eat better and learn how to manage stressful situations better. The eating better has already started, and since the beginning of this past week, I’ve lost the extra five pounds I’d gained, plus one more for good measure. I’m trying to learn to manage the stress side of things, and trying to keep my head in the game, even when I have to talk myself into strapping on the shoes and getting out the door.

So what to do? Keep running.
Review: “Godzilla”

June 2nd, 2014

I’ll summarize this movie by saying it was good, but not great. That said, let’s jump into it.

Note: There’ll probably be spoilers below. I’ll try not to give away too much, but they’re there.

The premise of “Godzilla” is that a pair of MUTOs (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Objects) have once again resurfaced after causing quite a problem fifteen years earlier. They threaten the world in a number of ways and it looks like nothing might be able to stop them. Until “he” comes along.

Yes, “he” is the titular monster of our movie, the big G himself: a relic of a time even before the dinosaurs, when creatures of ridiculous proportions walked the earth, feeding off of its highly lethal radioactive atmosphere. How, then, could such monsters continue to exist when the earth has cooled and millions if not billions of years have passed? By embedding themselves at the bottom of the oceans where even the technologic eye of mankind cannot see, and where they last in some type of unexplained form of hibernation, taking sustenance from the radioactive energy produced by the earth’s core.

When two of these atom-loving MUTOs break to the surface of the earth as it currently is, and of course cannot be killed by nukes as they feast greedily on the nuclear energy, then the balance nature’s power is thrown off kilter. It is at this point of fawning revelation that the Scientist (Watanabe) delivers a predictable and cliched set of lines to the stern Admiral (Strathairn) about humanity’s arrogance toward nature and concludes it with “Let them fight.”, setting up the battle du jour. Our titular hero then takes matters into his own hands by rising to the surface of the ocean to do epic, skyscraper-crushing, San Francisco ravaging battle with our “villians”.

When you go to see a monster movie, you expect to see monsters. And you do in this film, pretty early on. The movie isn’t trying to trick you or tease you about the monsters themselves. There is some teasing in the beginning of the film, but before you’re even halfway through, the monsters have presented themselves and the mayhem has started. However, if you want to see a good monster fight, then you will sit through a hour and forty-five minutes of a two hour movie. The fight (we can see) is only at the tale (get it?) end of the movie. This makes a certain cinematic sense given that, if it happened in the beginning, the movie would last twenty minutes.

And what a fight. Godzilla versus two MUTOs was a great battle, especially when the notorious B-I-G-odzilla breaks out his signature move. Really, all of the action sequences involving the monsters are stellar. It’s the rest of the movie was a let down

The characters drawn on the screen were as two-dimensional as if they were literally drawn on the screen. Each of the actors looks as if they were given a five word sentence about their character and told to make the best of it: grieving scientist turned conspiracy nut (Bryan Crantson); stoic family man and solider (Aaron Taylor-Johnson); panicked triage nurse and mother (Elizabeth Olsen); stern-faced admiral with a plan (David Strathairn); concerned scientist with a permanent frown (Ken Watanabe). I have to assign the blame to for these characters on the screenwriters, who simply didn’t spend any time developing them. And where they did, the character continuity was list to serve the greater plot. I swore I could hear a snarky version Taylor-Johnson’s internal monologue in my head in certain scenes, with things possibly like “Sure, dad, I’ll follow you into a quarantined area and risk getting arrested like you did earlier and put my entire US military career in jeopardy. Not out of character at all.”

To an extent, the people in a monster movie of this size are typically incidental, which is always a shame. And it surprised me quite a bit, given Gareth Edwards debut was a movie called “Monsters”, a deeply human movie with all of the focus on the humans and very little on the monsters themselves. I felt that “Monsters” was the best monster movie since “Jaws”. But “Monsters” and “Jaws” focus on the human relationships, with the monsters themselves bordering on macguffin. In a summer blockbuster monster movie, your monsters,unfortunately, can’t be simply a motivating factor. They must be the stars.

And Godzilla very much is the star of this show. When he’s on the screen, he is absolutely front and center, and for a CGI character, has a surprising amount of charisma. His foes, while they don’t have as much charisma, do have one scene that shows more heart than than what was written for much of the rest of the cast. But unlike, say, a “Transformers” movie, “Godzilla” is the result of a monster movie taking itself too seriously. It has no humor. While Gareth Edwards does human relationships better than a big Michael Bay brainsucker, a Michael Bay movie will always have some humor, almost in a teasing way that acknowledges the crazy-bigness of the movie without dropping you out of the story. There was nothing humorous in “Godzilla”, nothing to balance out the “end of the world as we know it” tension of the movie.

So, to sum up, I’ll simply restate how a friend of mine described it: “That was silly. But fun.” That’s about right. Good, but not great.
How Was Your Weekend (part 3) – New Books

May 28th, 2014

(Last one, I promise.)

Part of the Memorial Day festival in our town includes a library book sale. A buck a hardcover, or a buck for two paperbacks. This year I spent eight dollars and came away with some great reading:

Some are books I’ve read before and loved but don’t own (South of Broad). Some are books I’ve always wanted to read (the Bachman Books). Some I think I was supposed to read but didn’t (All Quiet On The Western Front). Some I read but I think a reread now that I’m older will allow me to appreciate the book more (A Separate Peace). Some I’ve seen in a past life while shelving books and thought “Now that looks like a cool book” (The Company). And some are just for fun (Elmore Leonard).

All in all, for eight dollars, I think my summer reading (and then some) is all set.
How Was Your Weekend (part 2) – Updating the Addams Family Patch

May 27th, 2014

The front part of my house gets no sunlight in the summer. I have a pretty large tree in the front yard, such as it is, and another tree right next to it. And because I don’t really have a house but rather a condo, I therefore don’t really have a yard so much as I look out on the common areas of the property.

Don’t get me wrong, the condo property is beautiful, the trees tall and gorgeous, especially during the Fall, and I don’t miss mowing the lawn or shoveling the walk. But I can’t do much about the trees.

Because of said trees, I have a helluva a time getting anything to grow in the small patch of land I do own, which is the garden in front of the house. I plant flowers and bushes that are partial or all shade, but sometimes they last and sometimes they don’t, and then the winter comes and the snow and ice tumble off the roof and crush anything that had only the slimmest hope of survival. It gets so bad that my wife jokingly refers to it as the “Addams Family patch.”

All this said, about every five years or so I have to yank everything out and start all over again. So part of what I did over Memorial Day weekend was tear up the front garden, till all the soil, and replant just about everything. The only things I left were two hastas (cause nothing seems to kill them and my daughter begged me to keep them) and a few day lilies (which I love to see bloom for literally the one day per year they do so). Which means the garden went from this:

to this:

PS – Every single rock you see lining the garden came out of the garden throughout all the times I’ve tilled the soil. It wasn’t until I started tearing up the garden the first time ten or so years ago that I understood all of the farmer walls in New England. Honestly, how did anybody grow anything here when they first settled?
How Was Your Weekend?

May 26th, 2014

It was a long weekend here in the States, a holiday weekend. Memorial Day was today, which is the day we celebrate the men and women who served our country and gave their life in that service. To honor that sacrifice, our town holds a Memorial Day festival every year. And for a tiny town of about four thousand people, it’s a helluva festival.

The day goes something like this:
9:00 AM – Katie’s Memorial 5k Race
11:00 AM – Memorial Day parade
11:30-ish – General merriment and festivities on the Common

It’s always fun, always impressive, always crowded. It starts with the race, and this year the whole family ran the race, with my younger daughter finishing second in her age group (a total surprise to all–including her). We all got the memorial shirts, and my daughter even got a glass and a custom-made cookie as the second place prize. Then the parade got under way, which starts down by the town cemetery, and eventually makes its way up the hill to the main street, and then down the main street which is always lined with spectators. And you always know when the parade is getting close to the main street because you can hear the pipe and drum core as they lead the way with the colors. It really is a fantastic parade for a tiny little town.

Here’s some photos from the day (and, yes, the sign on the back of the tractor in the last picture does indeed say “Tractors and Tiaras”):
Brand New Batman Comic (As Drawn By My Daughter)

May 19th, 2014
My daughter decided to draw a few comic strip panels on Sunday. Since they’re featuring a brand new Batman advenure (and a little bit of a Superman cameo), I figured I had to share.

I’ll include some explanatory notes as well, in case the action is not immediately evident.
- Panel 1: Someone is trying to steal a mermaid.
- Panel 2: Here comes Batman!
- Panel 3: Batman has knocked the villain out cold and saved the mermaid.
- Panel 4: After saving the mermaid, Batman’s outa there.
- Panel 5: Superman, droppin like bomb, on an unsuspecting villain.
- Panel 6: That villain is history.
- Panel 7: The Joker has pulled a Jurassic Park and has unleashed a dinosaur. The public is running scared.
- Panel 8: The Joker at the dinosuar’s control panel. “Maniacal laugh!”
- Panel 9: From out of nowhere, Batman zaps the dinosaur, saving the day.
- Panel 10: The Joker is about to steal a bag of gold from the bank.
- Panel 11: Here comes the Caped Crusader. “Not so fast!”
- Panel 12: With a might BOOM!, the Joker is defeated, as is the bank.
I hope she keeps drawing these. I love them.
Book Review: “Robert B Parker’s Lullaby”, by Ace Atkins

May 16th, 2014

I picked this one up on remainder at Barnes & Noble last week. I discovered the character of Spenser about two years ago, around this time. Took a Spenser book on a road trip to Indiana in May. Since then, I’ve read about two-thirds of them.

The Spenser series is an interesting and often times terrific read. They’re almost like a candy you can mainline right into your bloodstream. I’ve jumped back and forth between the older ones and the newer ones. I haven’t been reading them in chronological order. That’s made the world of crime fiction’s most famous Boston-based private detective a little disjointed, but not cumbersomely so. Probably the most interesting thing about flipping back and forth between the older books and the newer ones is witnessing the evolution of a writer, something that might not have been as evident when the books are read in slow succession as each one was released.

As the series progressed, Parker’s style became leaner and leaner. Some books clock in at barely more than two hundred pages. Some inch up to the two-seventy mark. It’s a rare book that hits three hundred pages. The brevity of language and the brisk storytelling pace led some to claim Parker was “slipping” as he aged, but I disagree. Some books might read better than others, but none failed to entertain or, worse, compromised the character for the purpose of the story.

This might be the longest introduction to a review ever. But I feel it’s important to understand how Parker told the stories of Spenser before we jump into whether his successor, Ace Atkins, hand picked by the Parker estate to carry on the character, succeeded or failed.

So which is it? Did it succeed or fail?

Maybe a bit of both.

As characterizations go, Atkins came pretty close to capturing the voice of the world’s smart-aleck-i-est detective. There are a few misses with the side comments and wisecracks, but they’re few and far between. What is perhaps more noticeable is how heavy-handed the smartass is laid on. There comes a point where you begin to wonder whether Atkins’s Spenser is capable of a serious remark or any serious introspection, something Parker would lapse in and out of. It rounded out his character very well, but for the purposes of “Lullaby”, Atkins shies away from introspection.

The dialogue certainly snaps. But it’s far more profane than a typical Parker outing. Parker used obscenities in his books the way Spielberg used the color red in “Jaws”: when you saw it, it was blood and it was designed to elicit a visceral reaction. So too did Parker use curse words in his books. They were there, no doubt, he certainly wasn’t a prude. But they were only there when needed. Atkins meanwhile laces the four letter words in and out of the dialogue with a kind of reckless abandon.

But if the obscenities are a little more hard R than soft R, it’s less noticeable than Atkins treatment of the world of Spenser, or rather, the world of Robert B Parker. In many ways, it feels like Atkins is trying to establish his bona fides for writing a Spenser novel by pulling out references to as many previous Spenser books as he can. He mentions everything from Hawk being shot by Ukrainians (a reference to “Cold Service”) to Spenser having a wood carving hobby (reference to “The Godwulf Manuscript”). Between the character traits and the previous history, Atkins is overly zealous in demonstrating his Spenserian knowledge. This shows in his use of characters themselves as well. We get appearances from the usually cast (Susan, Hawk, Quirk, Belsen), but we get an onslaught of minor characters or references to minor characters (the Brozs, Gino Fish, Vinnie Morris, Tony Marcus, Ty-Bop, Junior, Paul, Z Sixkill). It’s nearly overwhelming to have so much of Parker’s cast one one stage such that it feels like a reunion show.

But so that you don’t come away thinking that the novel is a failure, I have to say that I’ve never felt more more danger for Spenser & Co. Without Parker to guide the disposition of his creations, Atkins may (or may not) be at liberty to axe one or two. As the books draws to a close, a slow investigation, in which much time is spent in cars staking out people, accelerates toward a violent conclusion. It was in these final moments that I feared for Spenser and Hawk in a way I had not in previous Spenser books.

All in all, it was an interesting read, at times fun, at times distracting. As hard boiled crime goes it was good, if not standard fair. In the end, though, it was certainly not Parker.
Excel Geeking: Using VBA And ADO To Pull Data From SharePoint Lists

May 14th, 2014
I’ve been developing a SharePoint team site for my area which will house all kinds of information about the process and tools that I and my team support. I’ve been tinkering with the team site now for about two weeks. I’ll say this about SharePoint: moving around it is definitely not intuitive, and you can build some unbelievably ugly sites if you don’t know what you’re doing. But once you get the hang of it, and if you have an eye for design and layout, it can be an incredibly useful place to house, well, just about everything related to your area.

That said, I began to wonder whether I could pull data directly from a SharePoint list using ADO. It turns out, you can.

Before I jump into the “how”, I’ll offer a little background on the “why”.

I’ve got a lot of lists of data stored in an Excel file. These lists are nothing more than support data. They are used by other applications (also spreadsheets). Because Microsoft Access is not a supported architecture where I work, we’ve relied on storing data in centralized lists in Excel and using SQL in distributed templates to pull in and refresh the data.

Since I can’t use Access, and since using an Excel workbook housed in a public directory (where anything and everything can happen to it) keeps me up at night, I’ve been thinking about better ways to control these lists. Enter SharePoint.

Okay, so now comes the big caveat: SharePoint is not a database. Yes, you can house lists of data in it. Yes, you centralize the control of it. Yes, you can control permissions to it. No, it is not a proper database. So using for anything other then simple lists of data is probably a really horrible idea. (And if you want even more info on the difference between using SharePoint versus a database, read this article on msdn.)

I specialize in really horrible ideas. Which is why I dug into whether I could pull data out of SharePoint and into Excel using VBA and ADO.

That’s the background. Here’s the code:
```
' Some public constants, but they can be procedure level
' if you don't think you're going to need them elsewhere.
Public Const sDEMAND_ROLE_GUID As String = "{8D4E11A0-5AAD-4214-B10F-CEA5194787D2}"
Public Const sSHAREPOINT_SITE As String = "https://yoursharepointsite.sharepoint.com/agsinwhateveryoursiteis/"

Sub TestPullFromSharepoint()
' This pulls the data from a SharePoint list. Don't forget a reference
' to the MS ActiveX Objects in "References".

' Variable declarations.
Dim cn As ADODB.Connection
Dim rs As ADODB.Recordset
Dim sConn As String
Dim sSQL As String

' Build the connection string: use the ACE engine, the database is the URL if your site
' and the GUID of your SharePoint list is the LIST.
sConn = "Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;WSS;IMEX=1;RetrieveIds=Yes;" & _
"DATABASE=" & sSHAREPOINT_SITE & ";" & _
"LIST=" & sDEMAND_ROLE_GUID & ";"

' Create some new objects.
Set cn = New ADODB.Connection
Set rs = New ADODB.Recordset

' Open the connection.
With cn
.ConnectionString = sConn
.Open
End With

' Build your SQL the way you would any other. You can add a WHERE clause
' if you need to filter on some criteria.
sSQL = "SELECT tbl.[Last Name] FROM [Employees] as tbl;"

' Open up the recordset.
rs.Open sSQL, cn, adOpenStatic, adLockOptimistic

' Copy the recordset data to a worksheet.
ThisWorkbook.Worksheets("Sheet1").Range("A2").CopyFromRecordset rs

End Sub
```
I have to give two shout out links, without which this code would never have materialized. The first is how to find a SharePoint list’s GUID from Nick Grattan’s SharePoint blog. The second is the Connection Strings website, where I figured out how to cobble together the connection string for this post. Everything else is ADO 101.
Movie Review: Muppets Most Wanted

May 12th, 2014

My wife and I took the kids to see “Muppets Most Wanted” this weekend. As a matter of full disclosure, I should state up front that I didn’t really want to see it in the first place. From all the commercials and trailers, it didn’t look like it was up to the caliber of the last movie, “The Muppets”. In the context of my disinterest, I was not disappointed. It was as poor an outing as I expected.

I won’t try to give away too much of the movie, though it’s not so full of plot twists or turns that you don’t see any of them coming. This is a movie geared to children after all, and you don’t want to lose your core audience. As the movie opens, we find ourselves right where we left off with the previous movie. Literally. The streets are thronged with fans and supporters all cheering on the Muppets. Then the “cameras” stop rolling and the crowd disperses, with the Muppets learning that the crowd were mostly extras and a few paid performers. But just as quickly they learn that there is at least one camera still rolling, still framing them. With a sudden realization they deduce that the studio must have greenlit a sequel. At which point we get the Exposition Song, which cleverly states that everyone knows the sequel isn’t quite as good. This might be the highlight of the movie. It is certainly the most clever part.

As plot goes, it’s not much more than an update on The Great Muppet Caper. A con man, played with a fair amount of sleaze and slime by Ricky Gervais, tricks the Muppets into riding their newly rediscovered fandom to a world tour. Little do they realize that the world tour is a simply a way of taking advantage of particular settings, venues that are all situated next to a museum of some sort. Each museum holds a key to the ultimate heist, which concludes in London. But while Gervais gives a nice turn as Dominic Badguy (“It’s pronounced ‘Bah-jee’. It’s French.”), the mastermind behind this dastardly heist plot is the nefarious Constantine. He is billed as “the world’s most dangerous frog”, and the fact that he bears a striking resemblance to one Kermit the Frog is, shall we say, convenient.

After escaping from the Siberian gulag where he was imprisoned for an undetermined length of time, he manages to switch places Kermit, taking on the role of Muppet emcee, while at the same time serving as the brains behind the upcoming heist. Kermit meanwhile ends up trapped in a Siberian gulag and, despite the fact that it’s immediately evident he is not Constantine, he is held captive nonetheless by a moon-eyed gulag warden played by Tina Fey. Yet even while imprisoned, Kermit cannot escape the call of the stage, directing the gulag prisoners in a ridiculous the music and dance review.

There’s plenty more, with all manner of gags and jokes, riffs on the past, and characters given some time to shine that were not seen in the last outing. Some of it’s funny, but not enough of it. Some of it could have been brilliant had it been given more chance to shine. Ty Burrell turns in a hilarious performance as the French interpol investigator, teamed to discover the root of the heist with Sam the American Eagle. Together they steal the screen, with Burrell turning in the best Non-Frenchman-As-Frenchman performance since Peter Sellers. It’s too bad we didn’t see more of him.

What really struck me, and why I came away from the theater with an underwhelmed feeling, is that this movie, unlike the last one, felt just like what it is: an attempt to capitalize on a franchise line that was reinvigorated by a previous outing. I felt a similar way toward “Star Trek Into Darkness”, which tried too hard to please the fanboys, but still didn’t leave me as wanting as this one. I found “Muppets Most Wanted” largely without heart and without comedy, a kiss of death for a movie like this. Contrast it with the previous movie, which was the most touching love-letter to a lost franchise that I think I’ve seen in years. “The Muppets” was lovingly crafted first and foremost by Jason Segel, a self-proclaimed number-one-fan of the Muppets, and it showed. “Muppets Most Wanted” felt crafted by Disney accounts trying to pad the bottom line.