Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
How do I get the 3D pie charts to rotate, all these options are grey'd out. Is this a glitch? How do I fix this if I don't have the installation disc anymore?
Hi,
So you want me to be grumpy first thing in the morning, eh?
Well, they do rotate, but first I'm going to make a mild rant to get
this off my chest. (Apologies to DS). And please put my rant in
perspective. This situation is not as bad as Fannie Mae losing $29
billion, religion being passed off as science in schools, or crime in
the streets.
Usually Mac Office does things first and then the stuff gets ported over
to Windows Office. In this case, the opposite happened. The Windows
Office team cooked up something and the Mac team got stuck with it.
What happened was the Windows Office team decided that it was time to
revamp the entire drawing engine in Office. I can't really blame them.
The drawing engine was almost 20 years old. Developers and their bosses
have convinced themselves that slogans (and the concepts behind them)
like "managed code" will take them forward into the future in ways that
let them offer new capabilities to their customers.
That's all well and good, but along the way they lost one or two
excellent existing capabilities. 3-D chart rotation is one such casualty
of this "newer is better, just you wait and see" promise.
I just did a quick Google Groups search on Excel 2007 3-d Charts and
found 541 postings about them. Not earth shaking but clearly it's a
problem that needs to be solved by the Windows team. There was 44 hits
for Excel 2008. That's about 9% of the number of Windows hits and it
shows Mac office users are affected proportionately.
Really, I think something just went wrong along the way at the Windows
Excel team. As you noticed in Mac Excel, there's an interface that just
doesn't seem to work. It's the same in Excel 2007 for Windows. My bet is
that the Windows team tried to implement chart rotation the way it was
in XL 2003 and earlier, but they either ran out of time and never
finished, or they got something working but it was really awful or
crashed Excel.
There's actually something that you and everyone else who comes across
this posting ought to do about this. Use Mac Excel's Help menu and
choose to send feedback to Microsoft and ask them (politely) to fix 3-D
chart rotation. Squeeky wheels get greased. It's worth the effort to
take this step. That way MacBU can put some pressure on the Windows
Excel team to let them know: "Hey! Our Mac customers are complaining
about this. You screwed it up. Fix it!"
So let's get started on rotating our pies. Hot, warm pumpkin pies with
real whipped cream are nice at this time of the year.
First, you can rotate only 3-d Pie and Exploded Pie, and 3-d Exploded
Pie charts. Flat pie charts and the new Pie of Pie and Bar of Pie graphs
can't be rotated.
To rotate a rotatable (is that a word?) chart, right-click or
control-click on the pie. Choose 3-D Rotation from the pop-up menu.
This displays the interface with many dysfunctional buttons. The good
news is some of the things in this dialog box work.
First thing you notice is that TYPE doesn't work. It can't be changed.
Next, you see all the grayed out buttons next to X, Y and Z, which refer
to the axes. These buttons don't work either.
Then you see degree values next to the non-working X, Y, and Z buttons.
These DO work. You can click into the boxes and type numbers and the
graph will rotate. The trick is to click into the entry box and then
press and hold down either the up or down arrow on your keyboard. You'll
see the chart rotate in somewhat slow, incremental steps, but it will
rotate. You can also click down and hold the up and down arrow buttons
immediately to the right of the number entry fields. These methods work
for depth and autoscale, too.
This feels like a last minute work-around rather than a something that
should have been included in a shipping product - but at least it works.
And slow as it is, it works twice as fast on a Mac as it does in Windows
(This really sucks on their side - they can barely rotate charts).
What's completely missing from both the Windows and Mac versions is the
ability to just grab the chart and rotate the thing with your mouse.
That simply has to come back to make the rotation feature usable again.
Microsoft took a hint from Coca-Cola. When Coca-Cola came out with "new
Coke" a lot of people thought it was not as good as "classic" Coke (me
included). I buy caffeine-free Coke Classic and it still has that
wonderful hint of nutmeg in it and doesn't screw up my brain with
useless drugs.
You can still have "classic" 3-D Pie charts in Excel 2008. From the
Insert menu choose Object and in the box select Microsoft Graph Chart,
then click the OK button.
Viola! The classic interface returns! While it's open you can click into
your worksheet, select the data range, and copy it with Apple+c.
Next, click into the data sheet for the chart. In the upper left corner
of the data range is a blank cell. Click on that cell. Then use either
Edit > Paste, Apple+v, or use Edit > Paste Link (if you want the data in
the graph linked to the data range on the worksheet).
There you go! You can format and easily rotate your 3-D charts now.
-Jim
--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP
WE NEED YOUR HELP!
The number of new Mac users has skyrocketed. That’s excellent. In this
forum all answers come from other users, not from Microsoft employees.
Please help answer questions.
If you see an unanswered question that you know the answer to, please
take just a moment to post the answer. Doing so speeds response time for
people who come here and need fast responses.
If you see an answer that might be wrong or that you can answer better,
hop right in and offer your thoughts. Don’t berate a wrong answer –
we’re all here trying to help each other.
Don’t bother with questions you’re not quite sure about or don’t know about.
Please take just a moment to help fellow Mac users. Your efforts will be
appreciated greatly - especially by those you help.
