- In this movie, I'll show you how to manage multiple
open documents inside Illustrator and so what I've got here
is the five artboard version of the artwork along with each
one of the artboards relegated to an independent document.
And the way that I did that, just in case you're curious,
is I went up to the File menu and I choose Save a Copy
that way I'm not harming or renaming the original file
and then I went ahead and entered a file name of
Busted up and clicked on the Save button, then inside the
Illustrator Options dialogue box, I went ahead and switched
the version to CS6 just to make these files as compatible
as possible and I turned on Save each artboard to
a separate file and instead of selecting All, which would
save a duplicate of the five artboard file, I went ahead
and selected Range and left it set to 1 - 5
and then I clicked Ok.
But given that I've already done that in advance
and it takes a few moments, we'll go ahead
and click on the Cancel button.
Alright, now you can switch from one document to another
by clicking on its Title tab, like so, that much I think is
pretty self-evident but you can also switch between files
from the keyboard.
On a PC, you press ctrl + tab and on the Mac, you press
cmd + ~ and the tilde key is that wavy character that's
in the upper-left corner, just below the Esc key
on an American keyboard.
So again that's cmd + tilde on the Mac to switch
to the next window and if you keep pressing one
of those keyboard shortcuts, you're going to eventually
cycle around to the first document.
Now for some reason you're having problems
getting this keyboard shortcut to work, then the most likely
culprit is the Caps Lock key, which at least prevents the
keyboard shortcut from working on the PC, doesn't
seem to really affect things on the Mac but I just want
you to know what's up there.
If you want to cycle backward through your documents,
then you press ctrl + shift + tab here in the PC,
that's cmd + shift + ~ on the Mac.
Alright, you also have the option of viewing
multiple documents at a time by going up to this
Arrange Documents icon, again, you're going to find that
in a separate so-called Application Bar between the Menu
Bar and the Control Panel, farther over here
on the left-hand side of the screen but in any event,
go ahead and click on it and switch to this first icon
in the second section which is two up, and you'll end up
keeping all of your documents but one in this left-hand
window and then you'll send the last document
over to a right-hand window and to center it, I'll just
go ahead and click in that right-hand window and I'll press
ctrl + 0 or cmd + 0 in the Mac and then I'll click in the
first window in order to make it active.
Now notice that we can see three Title tabs but we can't see
the fourth one and so if you run into that problem, which is
very common when you have lots of documents open, go ahead
and click on this double-arrow icon right there
which will bring up a menu of the open documents inside
this window and then you can go ahead and switch to
the one that I can't see right now, which is Busted Up
square 3 and now I'll press ctrl + 0 or cmd + 0 on the Mac
in order to fit it on screen.
Now the obvious advantage of this technique is that you can
view multiple documents at a time but just bear in mind that
only one of the documents is active and that's because you
can only work on one document at a time inside Illustrator
and you can tell which document that is because it will
appear with the bright title instead of a dimmed one.
Alright, now let's say you want to move this document
into the other window, then you can just go ahead and drag
it and drop it but make sure that you can see a blue frame
so in other words, you want to make sure that you're
dragging into that Title tab bar as you see me doing
right here because if you drop it at some other location
you're going to end up with a floating document window.
Now you can scale this window to any size you like
just by dragging on one of the edges like so.
On a PC, you can move a floating window over the Menu bar
on the Mac you can't but you rarely want to work this way
and so to put the document back inside one window or the
other just go ahead and drag it so that you see that blue
frame and then drop it into place like so and that
gives you the option of viewing two different illustrations
at the same time as we're seeing here.
Alright, now let's say you want to bring all of the
documents back together in a single window, then go ahead
and click on that Arrange Documents icon once again and
click on this first icon, Consolidate All and that'll put
all the documents in a single window.
They might not be in the same order as they were before.
For example, notice that Art Square 4 is
now appearing before Art Square 3.
That's no problem though because you can
always change the order of your documents,
just by dragging a Title tab, but you have to be very
careful to keep it in this horizontal bar.
If you drag it out, you'll end up messing things up,
like so and then you're going to have to start over
again, which is, unfortunately, very common.
So just make sure to drag carefully and you should be ok.
And now you can cycle through the windows, just like you
were before, either by pressing ctrl + tab here in the PC
or cmd + ~ on the Mac.
Alright, another option that's available to you is
to see all of your artwork at once and you do that by
once again, returning to the Arrange Documents icon
and selecting the second icon, Tile All in Grid, which will
create as many windows as are necessary to contain
all of your open documents and now I'm just going to
click inside of each one of them and press ctrl + 0
or cmd + 0 on the Mac so that we can see each one of
these documents on screen and those are the various ways to
manage multiple open documents here inside Illustrator.