Everyone in this video we are going to take a spreadsheet data and turn it into a good looking graph in Illustrator. It's really cool. It is uh, got the data built in so we can go and change it. 50. We can mess with the colors, the fonts. There's a few little like quirks to using this tool in Illustrator.
But if you wanna be doing relatively simple graphs, it is a perfect tool. Alright, let's jump in and look at caffeine in coffee, in bar graph style. Alright, first up I have got a blank document and we're gonna find this charting tool here, okay? With the graphing tool. If you can't see it, go to window, go down to toolbar and go to advanced. Okay?
You should be able to see it here. Now I'm gonna do, I said bar graph. It's called a column graph here. Bar graph seems to be going left to right, but that's what I call a bar graph. I dunno about you and I dunno. So we're technically doing a column graph, it doesn't really matter.
The same techniques work. Okay, but I'm gonna use this first option here. Now, drawing a graph, uh, if you click once you get the teeniest tiniest world's little graph, okay? So you don't want that hit cancel. You wanna click hold and drag it out to roughly the size you need it to be. You can resize it later on.
It is a little bit tricky though once you've done a bunch of customizations. So my advice is get it close to where you need it to be to start with. Now, uh, to input the data, there is a fancy input data option. Okay? This is called the uh, graph data, okay? Uh, panel.
And this is where we put the data in to influence this graph here. But importing the data, you can do it. I find most of the time the data that I try and bring in is corrupted or at least is not the right format. It's not super clever of processing all sorts of data. So, um, just look at my one. So exercise files, I've got one called charts bar.
This is an Excel document. Okay? And click open and it goes, what the heck is this? And freaks out. Okay? So I find pretty much every time I do this, there's always something wrong with that import.
So what I tend to do is either open that exact same file in Excel, okay? On my Mac here I have something called numbers, um, which is the same thing, okay? Or open it up in say Google Sheets, okay? Whatever one you have access to and just copy and paste it. Um, when you are copying and pasting it, I know if I pasted all of this into Excel, it would go, oh, that's probably the title. This is probably the um, you know the heading for the columns.
Illustrator's not that smart. It will do column headings, okay? And all the data in those columns. So I just find copying the stuff I need. So I want the column headings and all the data in it. So I'm holding shift and just kind of clicking it all.
I'm gonna go to copy and I will type that in afterwards. The heading. So then an illustrator, okay, just make sure I'm gonna click on this and hit delete whatever's in the top right. Okay. And in this, sorry, top left. Okay.
And I'm just gonna paste it in. And then the magic bit is, doesn't seem to do anything. You've got to remember to click this little plus button. Okay? I said plus, but I mean tick. Okay, it says apply.
That's kind of really big for this one. Sometimes it can just, you just like nothing's working. It's because this data panel here needs the little tick done and you're like okie dokie, whatever you need. Okay? Just remember that little applied tick. Mine is a bit big even though I totally said don't make it too big or too small.
Resizing it. It's a good point. So like resizing it, you notice if I click on it with my black arrow, this is not the bounding box on the outside, it's in this like weird state that I am this special thing called a graph. You can see my properties funnel. I am graph, I have nothing, no width or no height. It's a funny old one.
You have to use this scale tool, which is this one over here and I'm gonna click hold and drag. Okay? And I'm gonna hold shift so it kind of goes down so it fits in there. It's a weird old tool, you can break it apart later on, okay? Um, and do a lot more like regular customization. But you want to kind of keep that data connection so that you can update the graph for next week, next month.
So it is handy to try and do workarounds to keep this thing a graph. Now I closed down that data panel, okay? How to get back to the data panel. So with a black arrow, have it selected, okay? And over here in your properties, down the bottom here, you might have to twirl down the text vector. There is graph data.
That's the little panel there. Okay? You can close it down, open it back up or you can go to object. And there's a whole section of graph here. The same thing. Go to data.
Data. I'm a data guy. Cool. And what I can do now is I can say, all right, instant coffee for the next month. I dunno. Let's say the average milligrams of caffeine has on average gone up in the last 10 years or whatever it is.
You can change it. All I did was hit enter on my keyboard or you can hit the tick. All right? Now to customize it 'cause all being black, no fun, I'm gonna leave that open. Let's grab the uh, direct, actually let's do the fonts first. Okay?
So to change the fonts, all you do is select on it with the black arrow. And over here in the fonts you can say I'm gonna put MEO 500. Can you see they all changed? You can do them individually by using the direct selection tool. So the a key, okay, uh, I'm going to click on just this one here, okay? With my direct selection tool.
And now I can say you are like a bold version of that. Alright? So that's the fonts, colors, okay, we wanna change the colors. So what I'm gonna do is same thing, the direct selection tool. I can click on this, okay? And I can go pick colors.
Now one thing I noticed is like I picked some library colors for this video. I was like, oh do some library colors. I just assumed that would work. It doesn't, okay? Some reason the color themes don't come through. I don't know why.
So what I had to do was in my libraries when I found these colors on color adobe.com, I had to right click and say, uh, let's add this color theme to the swatches. Okay? 'cause it works. If I go to properties and click on this one, go to fill. You can see there as a swatch, they come through some reason not a library. This might be different on your version, it's kind of a bug.
Um, I only just discovered it. I'm not sure how long it's been around. Probably forever. Um, yeah. So you just go through, select them, pick your colors. Alright, um, mine, we've all got strokes.
I'm gonna hold shift and click them all and say all of you guys have a new stroke. Alright, so that's how to customize it. We've done fonts, we've done colors in terms of the actual structure. Okay? There is a little bit of play you could do. So with the black arrow, have it selected.
Over here there's graph data. There's something called graph type. Okay? If you click on that, we're on this column type. Remember you can play around in here, have a look through, you can play with the con widths. Add the legend across the top.
Okay? At a drop shadow, it's my favorite one. Okay? So that's a drop shadow. I'm not sure why that that counts as a drop shadow. There's limited stuff you can do without breaking it apart.
But I guess we want to try and avoid breaking it apart as long as we can. Especially if we wanna reuse this. If you do wanna break it apart, just make sure you make a duplicate of it. So you've got one you can go back to and change. And then what you can do is you can, uh, it's weird if I got an object actually with this open, nothing happens. Let's close it on the data.
Oh, let me just quickly expand it. Okay? It's, the only thing in all of it is Australia that won't expand. Okay? For some reason we need to ungroup it. Okay?
Um, it's gonna give you the warning saying, Hey, by ungrouping it, you can't mess with all the data panel or the graph type. Okay? It's gonna become just shapes and look a little handles come back and now we get to mess with it as we remembered before. And ungrouping, it's kind of ungrouped part of it. Often there's a lot of ungrouping to be done. If you want to really get into it or remember our isolation mode, double click to go inside.
Alright, I'm gonna undo, before I got back there, the one thing I want you to remember before you leave this video is um, just to make sure that little tick box that gets me all the time, I'm messing around with stuff and it's not updating or I'm missing with any of these other features. Okay? And the little tick box hasn't been hit. Okay? So there you go. Look at that.
We made a graph. It kinda looks cool and it's not hard to kind of, I don't know, stretch this video out because there's a lot of gotchas and hopefully we've kind of avoided a few of those. But yeah, look at us. We made a bar graph, a KAA column graph, Dan. Alright, that is it my friends. I will see you in the next video.