My new, ingenious method to practice Spanish (now that I no longer date a Spanish-speaking woman, or in fact anyone at all) is to listen to the local baseball team’s games in Spanish on the radio. However, I have had zero previous exposure to Spanish-language baseball lingo, so I found this fantastic two-way baseball dictionary and am copying the terms I’m unfamiliar with (most of them!) into an Excel file in table format. One column is full of the Spanish terminology in normal type. The other, immediately to the left of it, is the English side, and it is organized thusly:
English
backup player
ball
dead
fair
foul
junk
to come up with
ballplayer
barrel
base
left on
to reach
to overrun
to overthrow
Most terms (not in this sample, but most on average throughout) are in normal typeface, but as you can see it can get into short strings of italic “sub-terms” which are related to one normal-type term.
Now, my problem is that Excel thinks it’s smarter than me. Aha!, says the misguided program, he wants everything in this column to go in italics! I’ll do it for him automatically! So I put in a term, tab over to the next column to type in the Spanish translation, and then have to Shift-Tab back to the English side to de-italicize it. Slimy bastard program! “I’ll decide which ones need italicizing and which ones don’t, thankyouverymuch!”, I tell it, but Excel only taunts me and continues to italicize the next three or four terms after one I italicize, after I “submit” the term and move on to another cell. Grr.
Any ideas for how to tell it to stop guessing?