- If I had to name Illustrator's most unexpected feature,
it would be the program's ability to create graphs,
by which I mean you can actually
import a spreadsheet of data
and generate bar graphs, line graphs, pie charts, and so on.
You can even create these things called graph designs
in order to render out beautiful-looking pictographs.
There's just one little problem.
Before you can do a darn thing,
you have to decide the size of your graph.
And when I say size, I don't mean the approximate size,
I mean the exact size, which is a big oversight, of course,
because it's virtually impossible to know exactly
how big you want a thing to be before you make it.
So, what invariably happens
is you create the graph all the way through,
and it ends up being the wrong dimensions
or just the wrong proportions.
And the one thing you can't do
to a graph after you create it
is scale it non-proportionately
because it'll just end up looking squished.
So, what you have to do is figure out the dimensions,
usually after making the darn thing,
and then recreate the graph from scratch
with those dimensions in mind,
which is a black eye on the feature.
But the process of recreating the graph,
it actually goes by pretty quickly.
In fact, I'm going to show you exactly
how that process works in this very chapter.
So, in conclusion, creating a graph in the first place
takes some time and effort,
and then recreating it goes lickety-split.
Plus, hey, it's Illustrator,
so you can achieve some really great-looking results,
as we will in the following movies.