- [Instructor] In this movie,
I'll introduce you to the artboards panel.
Which allows you to manage your artboards,
either in tandem with, or independently of,
the artboard tool.
Now to get to the panel, you go up to the window menu.
Which provides access to every single panel
that's available to you inside Illustrator.
And it does so in alphabetical order.
And you choose the artboards command.
Now initially, your panel might be a little bit too short,
in which case you can scale it by
dragging either this top boundary,
or you can drag this bottom border if you prefer.
At which point, you'll ultimately see a list
of every single artboard inside your document.
Now I want you to notice something
about the order of the artboards.
The top artboard is actually at the back of the stack,
and the bottom artboard is in front.
And so, for example, if I were to switch
to the artboard tool, which I can get by pressing shift O,
and I grabbed artboard zero right here,
and I dragged it to, say, this position.
If I were to now click on this little sliver
of artboard six, I would end up selecting it,
as you can see here inside the artboards panel.
But if I were to click on this part of artboard six,
I would actually select artboard zero.
And that's because even though it appears
lower in the stack here in the artboards panel,
it's actually forward of artboard six.
And so in other words, the front most artboard there is,
is going to be artboard d, right here.
And to show you what that looks like,
I'll go ahead and select it,
and I'll drag it on top of artboard eight,
and now notice if I click on this portion of artboard eight,
I do indeed select it.
But if I click on this portion,
I end up selecting artboard d instead.
So always remember the top artboard
is actually at the bottom of the stack.
Alright, now just as you can select multiple artboards
out here in the document window,
you can select multiple artboards
inside the artboards panel.
To select a range of artboards,
click on one and then shift click on another.
So notice because I clicked on artboard two
and shift clicked on artboard zero,
I end up selecting all the artboards in between as well.
If you want to select non-adjacent artboards, for example,
if I wanted to add artboard d to the selection,
I would control click on it.
That would be a command click on the Mac.
And you can see that all of these artboards
are selected here inside the document window,
and that's because my artboard tool is active.
However, I could press the escape key to exit
the artboard editing mode,
and return control back to the black arrow tool,
and yet all of these artboards will remain
selected here inside the artboards panel.
Alright now I want to get rid of a few artboards,
and then move the other ones around.
So I'm going to click on artboard nine,
and shift click on artboard zero.
And then I also want to select artboard c and d,
so I'm going to control, or command, click on those.
That's going to be a control click on a PC,
or a command click on a Mac.
And then you just want to drop down
to this little trash can icon,
and click on it in order to delete those artboards.
And notice you don't get a warning message
asking you if you really want to delete the artboards.
The reasoning being that you're not actually
deleting the content of those artboards.
So all of my characters of type remain on screen.
However, you do have the option of undoing that deletion,
just by gong up to the edit menu
and choosing the undo command.
Or you can press control z, or command z on a Mac.
However, I do want to get rid of those artboards,
so I'll redo that deletion by pressing control shift z.
That would be command shift z on a Mac.
Now at this point I'll go ahead
and hide the artboards panel for a moment.
I could get rid of these extra numbers and letters
right here, such as the d.
I could click on it to select it,
and then I could press the backspace key,
or the delete key on a Mac, to get rid of it.
But you may find that there's times where you don't
actually want an object to be part of your illustration,
but you don't want to get rid of it either.
It might have been created by somebody else
and you don't want to ruin their work,
or you may want to keep it for later.
In which case, you can just move things off
into this dark gray paste board here,
and then you can retrieve them later.
So this way they're not really officially
part of your document,
but they're not completely gone either.
Alright now I want to take these two artboards down here,
and I want to resize them so that they match the others,
because right now they're a little bit taller.
And so I'm going to bring back my artboards panel,
which of course I could do by going to the window menu
and choosing the artboards command.
Or, notice we've got this little icon over here,
in the far right side of the screen, that reads artboards.
And so this little icon, two pages,
one portrait, one landscape,
that indicates the artboards panel.
And you can see the panel's name by hovering over it.
I'll just go ahead and click on that icon
to bring up the panel,
and then I'm going to select artboards a and b
by clicking on one, and shift clicking on the other.
And now if I want to resize those artboards
then I would click on this little fly up menu icon
in the top right corner of the artboards panel,
this item that looks like a bunch of horizontal lines,
and choose artboard options.
So this is yet another way
to resize artboards in Illustrator,
and the reason to use this option,
is when the artboard tool is not selected.
So notice even though the black arrow tool
is selected currently,
as soon as I choose this command,
Illustrator goes ahead and temporarily selects
the artboard tool and it shows us the selected artboards
here inside the document window.
All the non-selected artboards are dimmed,
at which point I'd go ahead and select this bottom point
in the reference point matrix,
and then I would change this height value
to eight double quote, so eight inches.
And then when I press the tab key,
Illustrator goes ahead and automatically
converts those inches to points.
At which point, I'll go ahead and click OK,
and notice the second I do,
Illustrator resizes my artboards.
So this is the before version of the artboards,
and this is after.
And it returns control to the black arrow tool
up here at the top of the tool box.
And that is my brief introduction to the artboards panel,
which allows you to manage your artboards,
either in tandem with, or independently of,
the artboard tool.