Excel 2010. Where are the handles to rotate 3D charts???

Hello- In older versions of Excel, I was used to grab 3D charts by the handles that you bring up clicking on the chart corners. It seems that this feature was removed in Excel 2010... or... is it still there and needs to be somehow "turned on"? It would really suck if now we are restricted to deal with the chart rotation by going to the chart settings and changing angle values and stuff... we want those handles back!!!

Thanks in advance for your comments or help in case the handles are still there and point me to the right direction.

C.

April 21st, 2011 8:19pm

Hi

The rotation handles aren't there anymore.

You'll need to use the 3-D rotation buton on the Layout tab, or the Format Selection button with the Walls selected, or it's on the right mouse button menu again when selecting the walls.

 

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April 22nd, 2011 9:20am

Thanks for your reply... What a pity that MS discarded this feature. I know how to change the view in a 3D graph, it's just that it is a pain in the butt to have to open the format chart window and type numbers to change the view one step at a time instead of grabbing the chart and rotate it as much as you wanted back and forth with one single click. Wish MS gurus would listen to user recommendations and bring this little tool back.

 

Cheers

April 22nd, 2011 8:00pm

A pity indeed!  I wrote that code 20 years ago as an 18 year old Microsoft intern, and have enjoyed demoing the feature.  I tried to do so today and was sorely disappointed to discover that it no longer works.  This also became my first US patent, #5,557,714, "Method and system for rotating a three-dimensional model about two orthogonal axes".  Obviously, the patent is expired now, so maybe I should point the OpenOffice team to it.

For years I've meant to suggest a minor improvement.  At the time, computers were quite slow, so by default, it only draws an outline of the axes.  A very little known feature is that if you hold down CTRL while dragging the mouse, it would draw a wireframe of your actual data.  Most of the implementation effort involved getting all the different chart types to draw wireframes instead of the normal formatting.  But nowadays, there's no reason for either speed shortcut.  Modern computers could easily draw the full graph in real-time as you move the mouse.  It would have been a tiny patch to switch this.  This change would also make it trivial to resurrect the feature without touching anything else.

The actual code to compute the rotation given the mouse position, selected point, and chart bounding box is only 574 lines of C.  It's basically an application of the quadratic formuala, with special handling for some corner cases.  The prototype code (before integrating it into Excel) is still in my home directory.  Hell, I'd be happy to help bring the code back to life (for free!) if it was cut just because somebody couldn't figure it how it worked.  Send me an e-mail, Microsoft!

  • Proposed as answer by James Cone 16 hours 18 minutes ago
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June 28th, 2011 10:07pm

A pity indeed!  I wrote that code 20 years ago as an 18 year old Microsoft intern, and have enjoyed demoing the feature.  I tried to do so today and was sorely disappointed to discover that it no longer works.  This also became my first US patent, #5,557,714, "Method and system for rotating a three-dimensional model about two orthogonal axes".  Obviously, the patent is expired now, so maybe I should point the OpenOffice team to it.

For years I've meant to suggest a minor improvement.  At the time, computers were quite slow, so by default, it only draws an outline of the axes.  A very little known feature is that if you hold down CTRL while dragging the mouse, it would draw a wireframe of your actual data.  Most of the implementation effort involved getting all the different chart types to draw wireframes instead of the normal formatting.  But nowadays, there's no reason for either speed shortcut.  Modern computers could easily draw the full graph in real-time as you move the mouse.  It would have been a tiny patch to switch this.  This change would also make it trivial to resurrect the feature without touching anything else.

The actual code to compute the rotation given the mouse position, selected point, and chart bounding box is only 574 lines of C.  It's basically an application of the quadratic formuala, with special handling for some corner cases.  The prototype code (before integrating it into Excel) is still in my home directory.  Hell, I'd be happy to help bring the code back to life (for free!) if it was cut just because somebody couldn't figure it how it worked.  Send me an e-mail, Microsoft!

  • Proposed as answer by James Cone Saturday, April 25, 2015 3:09 PM
June 28th, 2011 10:07pm

This is NOT an answer. The answer is to bring back the feature.
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April 25th, 2015 7:32am

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