This tutorial covers tips and gotchas for using the Adobe Illustrator graph tool to create charts and infographics to communicate complex topics in a clear and simple manner. We also cover how to combine charts and dual axes, how to create high low charts, and other gotchas such as transforming and formatting in Illustrator.
Video Transcription
Hello, this is Eugene Peterson for Noble Desktop. In this second of three tutorials, I'm going to show you how to use the Adobe Illustrator Graph Tool, focusing on tips and gotchas. Introduction: Big data has generated a need to communicate complex topics in a simple and clear manner. In the words of Adobe, "A picture is worth a million data points." To that purpose, charts and infographics have become more popular than ever. Adobe Illustrator is a great way to design charts using the powerful Graph Tool. However, this feature does have issues and difficulties which I will highlight and provide work rounds.
Microsoft Excel does offer more options and flexibility in creating charts. For certain chart types, Illustrator does not offer an option. However, once exported from Excel, the graphic loses its link to the data and is not editable by Illustrator. Data also Excel does not feature artboards, and the only viable export file format is PDF. Both are issues that will require further production to make the chart ready for layout.
Missing Chart Types: There are numerous chart types beyond the venerable column or bar chart, pie chart, and line or area charts. Most notably, donut charts and the high-low or Candlestick or box plots or box and whisker charts are missing. Also unavailable are more scientific or esoteric charts such as heat maps, alluvial or stream or sand key diagrams, chord diagrams, coxcomb or Nightingale Rose charts, node link diagrams, radial bar charts, tree maps, bubble charts, radar or spider graphs, and the popular Venn diagrams. These can be created in Illustrator, just not using the Graph Tool's default settings. Tree maps and Hilo charts can be created in Excel and then edited in Illustrator.
Illustrator Graph Tool Tips: If we hold down the Alt or Option key and click on the Graph Tool icon, we'll cycle through the different chart types. Also, notice this label down here as I cycle through. It lists the tool that will be selected. Pie Chart Bubbles: One can easily create a series of bubbles based on a set of values. Here we have a pie chart. I'll select and right-click and will transpose, and we end up with accurately sized bubbles. This is tricky because scaling is not a function of the diameter or the radius, so this is a foolproof way to make it work.
Combining Charts and Dual Axes: Here we have a series of columns, one of them clearly is a summary of the other four, and we're going to create a dual chart and have the summary show up as a line. So we'll select the category with the Group Selection Tool, click once, twice, and three times, and make sure that the category legend is selected. Double-click the Graph Tool icon and let's have the axes of the line chart be on the right. Click OK and notice that we have two axes 0 to 10 and 10 to 30. But this really doesn't look like a summary. If you wanted to have all of this plotted on just one axis, we'll again select and double-click the Graph Icon and let's move this to the left side. Now we get a truly representative chart, where the line is clearly a summary of the four quarters, and the axes have been changed and combined.
High-Low or Candlestick Charts: High-Low charts can be one copied and pasted and edited from Excel to Illustrator, by hand, or three built with a set of three superimposed charts. I recommend option number one—copy and paste and edit from Excel.
Illustrator Graph Tool Gotchas: Transforming an object in Illustrator is one of the major gotchas.
If we select our chart, we notice that in the Properties panel there is no transformation information. The Free Transform tool also doesn't recognize the chart object. We can move with the arrow keys, or use the transform commands or transform tool to move, scale, or rotate the chart. Double-click the scale tool and it seems to be working great. If we need to align, the Align commands don't work either. We can use guides or a placeholder object to align a chart. Transform also doesn't work either.
Let's demo this by scaling the chart and make it bigger. Notice that it moved the marker is no longer on the high low path. The final gotchas when working with the graph object is that one can edit or format data text, but the formatting will revert the next time an edit is made to the data sheet. Moving is okay, but rotating doesn't work. Also, object color is sticky.
We'll select the graph object, make this 12 again, and notice it went back down and the text returned to its former place. How to rotate text in an Illustrator graph would be to move the color and use either point or paragraph text to rotate your values. That's all for this tutorial. I hope you've enjoyed learning how to use the Adobe Illustrator graph tool. This has been Eugene Peterson for Noble Desktop.