What is a Technology Preview?

Technology Previews are features and services that are released to the public before they are fully complete as features. A Preview gives you the opportunity to try out the feature, provide feedback, and help guide the development of the feature before it ships as final in a later release of Illustrator.

Creative Cloud Charts (CC Charts) — a new Creative Cloud service — allows designers to create compelling charts and infographics.

Illustrator supports the following types of charts:

You can now use any custom art to represent data values in the chart's design. Users now have unprecedented control and flexibility on chart elements – they can be stylized and treated for visual appeal, to create aesthetic charts, without breaking the link to the underlying data.

Represent numerical data with column charts (histograms). From the CC Charts web view, you can edit the data or the layout of the chart.

Here's how a typical workflow looks like:

1. Use the CC Charts tool to create a column chart or drag an available chart from a library in the Libraries panel to the artboard.
2. (For Scale by Value charts) In Illustrator:
   • Replace the chart element used
   • Edit individual chart elements
3. In the Chart object context menu, click Edit on Creative Cloud. A new browser tab or window is opened.
4. In the browser interface:
   • Modify the appearance of the chart
   • Import or add data, or edit data

Creative Cloud Charts web view

When you create a column chart object, to work with the layout of the chart, import or modify data, and more, you must edit the chart online in Creative Cloud.

When you edit a chart on Creative Cloud, in addition to modifying the data and the appearance of the chart, you can perform other actions.

• Details. Click the link to view various details about the chart.
• Zoom. In the Chart tab, specify a zoom value, choose fit the chart to the available space, or a realistic 1:1 view.
  Note: The zoom value is only for display purposes and does not affect the dimensions of the chart artwork.
• Share. Click Share > Send Link to forward a link of the image of the chart to a mail recipient.
• Actions. Choose from these actions:
  • Rename. Provide a new name for the Chart.
  • Delete. Delete the chart.

Context-sensitive column chart options

For the column chart, you can change the layout for the:

• Complete chart
• Value (Y) axis
• Category (X) axis
• Chart data

The options available for each of the parts of the column chart are specific to the section. These options are described in the next section of this article.

(Default) Click anywhere on the column chart

Click the Y axis. This includes the axis line or on the values displayed on the axis

Click the X axis. This includes the axis line or on the categories displayed on the axis

Click the values of the chart data.

Modifying chart layout

Chart options

Editing chart appearance

You can change the appearance of the chart. For example, you can change the artwork in Scale by Value charts or the color of bars in Columns charts.

Scale by Value charts

Replacing chart artwork

Editing chart artwork

Column charts

You can change the appearance of an entire chart, all the bars on the chart, a bar group, or a single bar. To change the appearance of a specific component of a chart, use the chart selection functionality in column charts.

Chart component selection using the Selection tool

A column chart contains different levels of selection. Illustrator, provides a drill-down functionality that allows you to successively select charts components at different levels.

For the column chart, the drill-down functionality works for the bars in the chart, the grid lines, and the axis lines.

To drill down the bars in a chart:

1. To select the entire Column chart, click once on a bar on the chart area.
2. To select all the bars in the chart, click again on a bar.
3. To select a bar group in the chart, click again on a bar.
4. To select a single bar, click again on the bar.

To drill down the grid lines:

1. To select the entire Column chart, click once on the chart area.
2. To select all the grid line in the chart, click again on a grid line.
3. To select a single bar, click again on the bar.

To drill down an axis:

1. To select the entire Column chart, click once on the chart area.
2. To select an axis and its tick marks, click again on the axis or its tick marks.
3. To select the axis line, click the axis line.
   OR
   To select a tick mark, click the axis tick mark.

Chart component selection using the Direct Selection tool

The chart drill-down functionality allows you to successively drill down the components in the chart. However, to directly select a component at the lowest level, you can use the Direct Selection tool.

To select a single bar, choose the Direct Selection tool (A), and click the bar.

Similarly, to select a single grid or axis line, choose the Direct Selection tool (A), and click the line.

Change the appearance of the components of column charts

By using the component selection functionality for charts, you can choose to change the appearance specific components of a chart.

To change the color of a group of bars:

1. Use the drill-down functionality, to select a group of bars.
2. Using the Illustrator Fill, choose a color to apply to the bars.

Similarly, you can change the colors of the other bar groups. You can also change the appearance of the grid lines.

1. Again, use the drill-down functionality, to select the grid lines.
2. Using the Illustrator Stroke, change the lines to dotted lines.

You can also change the appearance (such as font-family, font-size) of the text on the chart.

Select the entire chart.

1. Open the Character panel (Window > Type > Character).
2. Choose from the options in the Character panel, to change the text appearance.

To select specific text objects in the chart, you need to use the Direct Selection tool.

Importing/ Defining chart data

Editing chart data

Creative Cloud Charts (Preview) survey

We appreciate feedback. Tell us how we're doing.

Here's a really quick survey that helps us understand your level of satisfaction with the Creative Cloud Charts (Preview) feature. Where possible, please provide as many details as possible. Thanks!

Survey link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CC_Charts_Feedback.