OK, please ignore the paragraph below (my original response) I realize now that I completely misread Scott's reply to my question. Yes, I understand now and will take a look at the symbol's properties to see if I can set an angle field. Thank you!
OLD: Let me try to restate my question: I use shapefiles with character point features, and a couple of years ago when I first started working with them, I had tried to rotate them, but they would just snap back into place when I let go, so instead I converted to graphics. Then, just recently, for some reason I tried to use the rotate button again, and this time it worked: the points stayed rotated, AND, when I looked at the attribute table, I saw that a value had been placed into the field called rotation (I did not put the values there - they were put there automatically when I rotated the points by hand). So, encouraged by this, I tried to create a new shapefile, and included a field called rotation, and tried to rotate those points, but they did NOT stay rotated and did not automatically put a value into the field. I think I must have just stumbled across a very strange bug, because I swear to you that the points stayed rotated and they had values in a rotation field that I did not enter.
