Charles on… anything that comes along

We all here use Word. And it drives us all bonkers. Perhaps first because we’ve never been given any training in using it; but then what training do you need just to type?

Except we get constant annoyances. Some of the common ones (the answer to which is not in any case “it’s a virus”)
1) why does it suddenly decide to revert to a different template?
2) why, if you open a document someone else wrote with a different template/font/style, can’t you get it to just ignore those settings and show up in your preferred template/font/style?
3) why if you open something created with a different template, does anything else *you* open afterwards use that other template?
4) why, if you open something which was done in “Page View” (which I hate) do subsequent documents also open in Page View?
5) why, when you cut+paste from somewhere else, does it not paste in the same style as you are typing in? And why, if you delete a few characters around some text you pasted in, does the pasted text revert to some other font - often (in my experience) Times New Roman, which I don’t use?

Answers (apart from RTFM, because there doesn’t appear to *be* a FM) welcome. And interesting to note the experience of Doc Searls here: I’m looking forward to the day when [OpenOffice] offers the same degree of improvement over Word as Firefox does over Internet Explorer.

Amen to that.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Apologies (7 November 2004; score: 30.53%)
• Yeah, that might be a bug in Microsoft Word. Just, you know, guessing (20 March 2006; score: 28.7%)
• Could you explain the question first, Clippy? (1 October 2004; score: 24.99%)

Now answer this: how many stars - that is, true greats - of yesteryear in any sport would turn out to watch one of the top players of today practising?

Not many in football (of whatever sort), or cricket, I’ll bet. Yet when it comes to Roger Federer, who’s just won the US Open tennis title (to add to his double Wimbledon and one Australian Open titles), you get names from the past such as John McEnroe, Ivan Lendl and Martina Navratilova who would be happy just to watch the guy warming up. (Navratilova was offered the chance to play mixed doubles in a tournament with Federer. “Really?” she said to the organiser. “How much do I have to pay you?”)

That’s because Federer is without doubt the most complete player the game has ever seen. I spent 1985 to 1992 watching pretty much every match at the French Open and Wimbledon from the press seats, and those were some of the great times. But Federer puts them in the shade. “I wish I could have played shots like those,” McEnroe said recently. This, from a guy who produced some of the best tennis ever seen - up to that time - in the 1980 Wimbledon final, 1981 US Open final and 1984 Wimbledon final.

So when Tim Henman loses in the semi to him (by the not-bad score of 6-3 6-4 6-4) it should be seen in context: a really good player (that’s Henman) being beaten by one who is truly sublime. Henman’s probably the best British player we’ll ever see, certainly the best in the past 50 years - unless the Scot who won the boy’s US Open, Andrew Murray, turns out even better. Though it has to be said that champions at the junior level don’t always turn into champions at the seniors.

More than that: Henman’s a really solid top 10 player, and has been for at least four years. That’s a very long time in the modern game. Yet people who have no idea what it takes to stay near the top in the face of increasing competition somehow get schadenfreude from his not surmounting the heights. Will Hutton had a go at analysing this in the Observer yesterday but it all turned into the usual pudding of globalisation and so on. The reality seems to be that in Britain we have a problem with sporting heroes. We prefer to define them by their failures than their successes. In the US, it’s the reverse.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• McEnroe vs Borg: the 16th match.... in Tesco? And words on Henman (8 September 2007; score: 55.48%)
• iPod nano to shrink Apple's share of music player market. The hard drive bit, that is (15 September 2005; score: 27.9%)
• Two data points on the iPod's continuing popularity in the UK (19 October 2004; score: 26.04%)