Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to tell you how to use variable
data with Adobe Illustrator. So this would be using something like a Google Sheet or an Excel
sheet. And today we're going to use Google Sheets, because everyone has access to that for free.
Alright, let's get started. Okay, so first, we'll set up our document, I want this to be a 1200 by
470 web image. So I'm going to go to Create New, we'll come up here to Web. And in pixels, I'll
just have this be 1200 by 470. And we'll Create. First, I'm going to add my background by going to
File > Place. I've got all my backgrounds in the same folder. So I'll place that. Now we're going
to add in our first piece of variable text, so I'll hit T on my keyboard and click once. And I'll
type in 'networking'. Get back on my Selection tool, and grab a corner and hold SHIFT and make it
a little bit bigger. I want to change it to white. Now we'll come up here and choose Oswald. And I'll
just make this a little bit bigger. Now I'm going to add a rectangle underneath this, make that
white, and maybe we'll make it just a little bit bigger. And now we'll add my second piece of text,
which I'm going to use area type because this will be a lot of smaller text. And for this text,
I want it to be Montserrat. We'll do regular and a little bit bigger: 15 points. And I'll just
paste the actual text in. And I'll go to Paragraph and de-hyphenate, so we don't have all the little
hyphenations in there. Okay, and now I'm going to place another image over here. And this will also
be a variable image. So go to File > Place, and I'm going to choose the first one that I have set
up in that folder. Yeah, I'll just put it right here and move over a little bit. Now best case
scenario, all of your backgrounds are the same size, all of your images are the same size, and
it'll just switch them out with the spreadsheet. So otherwise, sometimes things will overlap,
and you'll get kind of weird results. So I really recommend making everything the same size starting
out. So this is what our design layout is going to look like. And now we'll go to Window > Variables.
So to set it up on the Illustrator side, we're going to click on this word, and then we're going
to click on this bottom button here which says 'make text dynamic.' So now Illustrator will
kind of know that this is something that's going to be coming in from a spreadsheet. And we'll do
that for all of the other pieces that we're going to bring in from the spreadsheet. So I'll click
on this text box, and click that. I'll click my background, and click the same button. And as you
can see, it shows a little picture and a linked file because Illustrator knows that that's going
to be a picture now. Then we'll click on the other image and do the same. Alright, and now
it's time to set up our Google spreadsheet. So to do this, we're going to use this variable one. So
I'm going to copy that, we'll come out here to Google Sheets. And I've already got one set up
as variable data. You can name it anything you want. And here is where we'll want to paste that
variable one. When we go back to our Illustrator document, you can see we've got variable 1, 2,
3, and 4. And you can keep these as variable 1, 2, 3, and 4, or you can name them whatever you want,
I usually just leave them as the variables that Illustrator puts it in. So across the top,
we'll need variable 1, 2, 3, and 4. And if you're using images like I am, you will need the @ symbol
in front of the ones that are images. So we'll add that to C and D which are background. And
our image, you can see that here, our variable three is an image or variable four, so they
absolutely have to have the @ symbol. Otherwise, Illustrator won't know that they're an image.
Now you'll want to type in all the info for the two text fields. So we've got 'networking' here,
and the text that goes with 'networking.' And I'm going to just paste these in. But you of course,
you'll just want to add them like normal. And then I've also got text in another document that
I can just paste in right here. Now for the image variables, we'll have to actually tell
Illustrator where to find those images. So we need to go out to our Finder and my first image
is the BG01. That's the one that I actually pasted into the Illustrator file. So to get
the information on that, I'm going to click on it and then hit CMD I, and then it'll say 'where.'
I'm just going to copy all of this information, and then go back to my spreadsheet. I'll double
click in that first networking area and paste it in. Now, you'll notice that it does not get the
file name, so we'll need to add that manually. So we'll add a backslash, and then BG01.jpg,
or whatever it is. Okay, it's PNG. I'll just hit return, select all and copy this,
to make sure it's exactly correct. Just delete all this and paste that in. So this will be the same
on these others, but with the other file name. So I'm going to copy this, and we'll just paste
it on down here. And now we'll go in and change the file names to match. They're just 2, 3, 4,
5, and 6. And we'll do the same with our other images. I'll just hit CMD I, I'll copy this,
and then I'll add this file name to each one. So we'll do backslash, I'll copy that and just paste
it in here, we'll fill out the others with their file names. Now, I do want to mention, if you're
on a PC, you cannot have any spaces in your file names. So all of this cannot have spaces,
but it doesn't matter on a Mac, it'll still work correctly. All right, now that we have our whole
spreadsheet done, we'll come up here to File > Download and comma separated values or CSV,
I usually just leave it in my Downloads folder. But you'll probably want to keep this with all
your other files for this Data Merge. Okay, let's go back to Illustrator. And now in our variables,
we'll want to click on these three little lines, and Load Variable Library. And now we can go to
our Downloads with OPT CMD L, I'm going to sort by recent ones, so I'll hit CMD 2, and choose Date
Modified. And then we'll choose the variable data. And we'll open. This says it already contains
variables, and do we want to overwrite them? Yes, we do. It shouldn't really change anything,
because all of these things are still the same as the one you put in, it'll be pulling from
that first one. So it'll look the same. So now we can click this little drop down by the data set,
and choose which one we want to look at. Okay, so we've got different text here, different
text here, a different background and a different image. And you can flip through all the different
ones right over here with these arrows. As you can see, we probably should change some of these,
for example, this line kind of bleeds into this area. So if we do, we can just resize this. But
just know that if you do that, and if you move it around or do anything to that, when you go
to your next data set, it will have updated on this one too, it will update across the board,
which that can definitely be a good thing. But it's going to depend based on the data set that
you're changing. Okay, so now if we want to export these, we actually have to create an
action for that. You can't just export as a PDF, it'll only export the one that's on your screen
at the moment. So let's go ahead and set up an action. And I'll show you how to do that. So go
to your Actions, that'll also be under Window > Actions. I've already created this, so I'm
just going to trash it, you don't necessarily need to do a new folder here. But you'll need
to create a new action right down here, and then record. Now I want these to end up as JPEGs. So
I'm going to go to File > Export > Export As. I'll create a new folder. I'll call it 'Done.'
And I'm going to export these as PNG and I'll use the artboards. And we'll export, I do want
it to be screen resolution. Background color can be just white, it doesn't really matter because
they all fill up the background. So we'll say OK. And then we'll stop our action with this little
square at the bottom of the actions window. Now we'll come back up to the Actions flyout and
choose Batch at the very bottom. So it's going to probably automatically load the last one you did.
You can see my set here is Variable Data. And it's Action 3, which is the one I just recorded. Under
Source, you'll need it to say Data Sets. Yours will probably be set to Folder so you'll need to
change it to Data Sets. If you chose an export action like Export as JPEG or Export as PNG,
you'll want to choose this bottom one. If you're doing a Save As action like EPS or PDF,
you'll want to do this action. Since I chose the Export one, I'll choose this one. And then I'll
choose a different folder. And I'll choose the Done folder. Also I want the file plus
the data set name. And we'll say OK. So now it's running through all of these different ones and
it's saving them out there in the Done folder. Okay, so let's check to see if it worked. Okay,
so here's the Done folder, and it has all of them. Now it's going to save your file name,
which I didn't name it - I probably should have. And you can see all the different versions that
the merge made. So it worked perfectly. And that's it. This will work really great if you had 100s or
1000s of entries in a spreadsheet and you can make all the different designs just in a few clicks.
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