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Chart Rotation - Not Quite
Exploring Mac OS X Aqua version of the beta 3.0 OpenOffice.org, there are some interesting qwerks appearing. One issue that was supposed to be resolved in the upcoming version 3.0 is that of rotating charts. On reading through some of the forum items it showed that this was now possible in 3.0 and possibly even in some 2.4 editions of OpenOffice.org. Trying the three different methods they suggested resulted in very different results!
Method 1: Copy the chart and then paste it as a GDI Metafile.
This method does work, but you first have to paste it into Draw to do the rotation as it does not seem to allow rotation in other areas such as Writer or Calc. Once you have rotated it within Draw, then you can cut and paste it as a bitmap or Draw object into Calc or Writer without too much issue.
Method 2: Use Format -> Position & Size to rotate the chart.
This seemed to be a very logical way of doing the rotation and should work as it is a consistent method for all other objects that can be rotated. Once the chart was selected, choosing the Format > Postion & Size dialog and clicking on Rotation, it showed all options greyed out. It seems that chart rotation is not an option this way at the moment.
Method 3: Using the rotate option on the drawing toolbar.
This was another possible option. When trying to "second click" the chart to get the rotation options, it just edits the chart. On checking through the help though it showed that the drawing toolbar had the rotate icon which you can see shaded (selected) in the image below. When clicked, it gives hope with the red rotation globes bounding the chart. However when clicking on them it shows a "not allowed" icon and you can't rotate from any of the rotation areas (corner or edges).
So what does this all suggest? Well, for one thing, it is certain that the chart rotation capabilities are not ready yet for v3.0 in the Aqua version of OpenOffice.org. Do the above rotation options work in other platform editions, that is still to be seen when a chance comes for the testing.
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