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Wrapping Up

The chart application shows how straight-forward it is to create applications and their dialogs with Qt. Creating menus and toolbars is easy and Qt's signals and slots mechanism considerably simplifies GUI event handling.

Manually creating layouts can take some time to master, but there is an easy alternative: Qt Designer. Qt Designer includes simple but powerful layout tools and a code editor. It can automatically generate main.cpp and the .pro project file.

The chart application is ripe for further development and experimentation. You might consider implementing some of the following ideas:

• Use a QValidator subclass to ensure that only valid doubles are entered as values.
• Adding more chart types, e.g. line graph, area graph and hi-lo graph.
• Allowing the user to set top, bottom left and right margins.
• Allowing the user to specify a title which they can drag into position like the labels.
• Providing an axis drawing and labelling option.
• Providing an option to provide a key (or legend) instead of labels.
• Adding a 3D look option to all chart types.

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