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!
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Proposed as answer by
James Cone
Saturday, April 25, 2015 3:09 PM