From the course: Illustrator One-on-One: Mastery

Graphing numerical data - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator One-on-One: Mastery

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Graphing numerical data

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- [Tutor] All right. Just so you have a sense of where we're headed, we're going to go ahead and compare the performance of the top five social media platforms, including LinkedIn. Now the thing about this graph is it's entirely fake. That is to say we're not relying on any real data that's out there, as warranted by the fact that these years down here at the bottom of the graph, are currently in the future. All right. But the Illustrator does allow you to work from specific numbers, as we're about to see. So I'll go ahead and switch over to the starter document, and I'll turn off the headline layer here inside of the layers panel, and then I'll click on the graph layer to select it. All right. Now what you want to do is drop down to the graph tool, which by default is going to be the column graph tool, which allows you to create vertical column graphs. You also have the option of creating horizontal bar graphs. You can create line graphs, area graphs, pie charts, and so forth. And obviously you can experiment with those tools as much as you want. I'm going to start off by creating a horizontal bar graph, although it doesn't ultimately make that much difference where you start, because you can always change your mind later, as we'll see in a future movie. All right, now, once you've selected a tool, you want to drag with it as if you're drawing a standard rectangle. And this is going to allow you to define the size of the bounding box. The thing is, it's very difficult to predict how this is going to work, because as you're about to see, the graph itself will appear inside this bounding box, but the legend or the key, if you prefer, which is going to tell you what each one of the bar graphs means, is going to appear outside the bounding box. I'll make my bounding box about this big, but in truth, you just kind of have to wing it at the beginning. Now, as soon as you release, Illustrator will display this floating spreadsheet window, at which point, you can enter some data. So I'm going to start by changing this first value to X, and then I'll press the Tab key to advance to the second cell and change it to Y, and then I'll press Tab again, and enter Z into the third cell. All right, now, I'll click in the first cell in the second column, and I'll just enter some arbitrary data here. I'm going to change the first value to three, then press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to advance to the next row. And I'll change that cell to four, and the next guy to five. And then I'll click in the first cell in the Y column, and I'll change it to five, and then I'll change the next guy to seven, and the value after that to nine. And then I'll click in the first cell in the Z column. I'll change it to seven, I'll change the next one to nine, and I'll change the final cell to 11. At which point you can go ahead and graph that data by clicking on this check mark, which indicates the apply button. So, we'll go ahead and click on apply, and you can now see that the graph appears inside that rectangle that I drew just a moment ago, and this legend over here appears outside the rectangle. All right, now you can just go ahead and close the spreadsheet, so we can better see what we're doing. And now imagine instead of these boring gray values, you'll want to add some color to your bar graph. In that case, you need to switch to the white arrow tool. And the reason is because notice here in the layers panel, if I twirl open the graph layer, that I have a new object simply called graph. It does not have any twirly triangle in front of it, meaning that you can't expand this object the way you can when you're working with a group, or a clipping path or a compound shape. And so what you have to do instead is dig inside the object, using the white arrow tool. And so I'll switch to the white arrow, just by pressing the A key, and then I'll click off the graph to de-select it. And now let's say I want to change the color of these medium gray bars, then I would press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac so that I see a plus sign next to my cursor. And I will click on this bar to select it. Now, if you want to select all three of the bars, you would Alt or Option-click on that first bar a second time like so. And notice that goes ahead and selects all of them. And then if you also want to select this gray bar in the legend, then you go ahead and Alt or Option-click a third time. And now that I have all of my bars selected, I'll click on this first swatch in the far left side of the control panel, and I'll select this shade of yellow. And of course you can select any color you like. All right, now let's say I want to change the color of these light gray bars, there's a slightly simpler way to work, which is to Alt or Option-click on the bar inside of the legend. And so notice the first time I Alt or Option-click, I go ahead and select this rectangle inside the legend. And then if I Alt or Option-click a second time, I will select all of the light gray bars inside the graph, after which point, I'll click on that first color swatch once again, and select this light shade of blue, in order to create this effect here. All right, now notice that the thumbnail for the graph object here inside the layers panel has not updated automatically. If you want to see it update, you need to twirl the layer closed, and then twirl it back open, like so. All right, now let's say you want to modify the data associated with this graph, then just go ahead and press the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool, click on any shape that's not currently selected to select the entire graph, and then right click anywhere inside the document window. At which point, notice this central section starting with type and ending with marker, all five of those commands are designed specifically for modifying graph objects here inside Illustrator. I'm going to go ahead and choose the second of these commands data, in order to revisit that spreadsheet. And now, I'll just go ahead and click on the number seven right here in the Z column, and I'll change it to a nine. Now let's say for whatever reason, you regard that as a mistake, you don't want to graph that data, then you would go ahead and click on this second icon from the right, revert, in order to restore that data you entered just a moment ago. All right. But I do want to modify these values. And so I'll change the first Z value to nine. I'll set the second one to, let's say 12 this time around, and then I'll change the third one to eight, and I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to make those changes. I'll go ahead and move this guy over a little bit. And this time, I'll click on the checkmark, in order to apply my changes like so. And then, assuming that you're done, you can just go ahead and close that floating spreadsheet. And that's how you use any one of the nine graph tools to chart numerical data here inside Illustrator.

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