Double click on the Graph with the Selection Tool and you should jump into Isolate Group mode… that in turn enables you to use the Selection tool to move the pieces apart without ungrouping the Graph.

Hope this helps.

Cari

@greg you can resize the graph by using your scaling percentage option.

Tania

The most important thing is that you do NOT ungroup your artwork at any stage. As soon as it becomes ungrouped things will fall over.

Hope this helps.

Cari

Can you try and draw a simple shape filled with colour on your art-board and see if Effects > 3D works on that (just to ensure there’s nothing wrong with the document itself).

Also try creating a small new pie-chart (with some bogus data), just the chart, no legends, and select it, try the command.

Does that work?

Cari

Thanks so much for chiming in on this one. Only just seeing Monica’s notes. Basically I find that if you do use Labels and legends things don’t work as nicely. E.g. I’d add those manually using the Type tool, rather than as part of the pie chart data.

Cari

I got the point…im going to examine my data again…maybe i will do the same as your team did

About the 3D tool problem: i suppose there must be a better solution. There must be a (simple and infallible) way of having a pie in 3D, but not the legend, rotated and extruded in the correct position…

i will send the solution, when i have it!

thank you, sincerely.m

Thank you for the clear and concise instructions.

The pie chart is created, *with series labels* on the top row of the data table. The chart works fine in 2D.

Following the above instructions, I select the pie ‘pieces’ (just the graphic part of the chart) and apply the 3D settings as advised above. The labels remain in 2D, but the chart pieces fly all over the place – some end up appearing higher on the page than other slices, some end up behind other slices, it’s really, really weird.

I think it’s because each piece is independently rotated / extruded / transformed by the 3d settings. This wouldn’t be a problem if it were a normal path, you could just group the pieces together thereby ensuring there’s a central reference point, and then apply 3D. But because it’s a chart you can’t group the pieces as special rules apply for chart objects.

It doesn’t look like you can both automatically feed data labels *and* at the same time have a 3D pie chart.

To get around this, I:
– created a 3D chart without data labels
– added a new layer
– manually entered data labels to the new layer
– used the eyedropper tool to copy colours from each label to the corresponding chart piece
– converted the chart to 3D

One final note – if you have HEAPS of data to display, I’d strongly suggest that you DON’T use a pie chart. Read this article http://optional.is/required/2009/07/20/pie-charts-and-other-circular-visualizations/ for further reference. Once I passed this article around to our sales team, there were far fewer requests for horrible big pie charts!

Its only need to hit the colour once to choose it, and twice to select the correspondent colour in the legend. (A+ tool).

Now a new problem…my chart has a lot of slices..when i use the 3D effects tool, the pie “explodes” and its impossible to understand anything.

help.please.

thank you,m