In this final exercise of the fundamentals portion of the series, and this may seem like a little bit of an anti-climax for a few of you. I'm going to show you how to export in illustration for using a Microsoft Office application. How awesome does that sound? However, this is going to be very useful for those of you who end up creating elements inside of Illustrator that you then place into PowerPoint. And so I have opened the Better type. ai file found inside the 12_exporting folder and I'm going to switchover to the forth artboard once again, the Skate & surf Artboard.
And let's say that I want to integrate these elements into a presentation. Well, I sure as heck don't need these Crop Marks. So I'll switchover to Layers panel, I'll twirl open the media layer. And the first thing I'll do is I'll turnoff the Static Crop Marks around skateboard by clicking on the eyeball in front of Crop Marks to turn them off. And then I'll scroll-down the list and I'll meatball this backboard item. And I'll switch to the Appearance panel. And I'll turn off the Dynamic Crop Marks effect. So that way I'm not deleting anything. I'm just hiding them for the moment. And I'm also going to marquee the side of the surfboard in order to get all the objects associated with that surfboard and I'm going to drag it over to the left just a little bit.
Alright, now I'm ready to export this artboard let's say. And I'll go up to the File menu and I'll choose this command right there, Save for Microsoft Office. Now I'm going to tell you in advance that this is the wrong command. This is not the way you really want to work, but it is the most obvious way to work. And Adobe created this command especially in response to the number two question that they were getting from their users. Now the number one request was, please give us multiple pages inside of Illustrator. That went on for about a decade by the way.
And we finally got multiple artboards inside of Illustrator CS4. But meanwhile, while that question was going on, question number two was, please give us a way to bring our illustration elements over into PowerPoint. So the Adobe team figured out that the best way to exchange information with Office applications in general was the PNG file format. And rather than having you get lost somewhere in the Export command for example, they created a specialty demand called Save for Microsoft Office.
It doesn't work worth beans, but it is here. And it does save your illustration as a PNG graphic. So I'll go ahead and choose that command and I'll name this Big file for PowerPoint and you'll see why I'm calling it big file in just a moment. It automatically saves out as a PNG document. That's your only option, notice Save as type PNG is all you got. You click on the Save button. And you wait. Notice that we have no options that are available to us whatsoever. I can't specify a resolution. I can't say whether I want to preserve my transparency.
All I get is this progress bar that's sitting here threatening to hang. Notice it's telling me Not Responding, which as I was saying, is not necessarily the end of the world where the CS5 applications are concerned, here under Windows. It may mean that the application is working very hard on doing what you asked it to do. And all of a sudden then the progress bar disappears. So what in the world was that about? Alright, let's go over to the Bridge by clicking on the Go to Bridge icon. And then inside the Bridge, I'll go ahead and grab that file, Big file for PowerPoint.png.
Well, already, pretty obvious, we've got some problems going. But I'll go ahead and double-click on it. And because I changed my file type associations, it comes up inside of Photoshop. It's a flat image. So no transparency was maintained. However, I do have each and every one of my artboards. Well, that's really useful. I mean, honestly Illustrator how wide you think my presentation is? It's going to take up several projectors here. But I'll go ahead and Shift+Tab away my right side panels and zoom in, so that I can see the various elements.
And notice that I have this fair amount of empty space at the top of the image. I have some space over here on the left hand side. I've got a ton of space at the bottom. What in the world does that about? And then I'm tight to the right-hand sleeve, interesting. And then finally we have a limited resolution. So illustrator's made whatever arbitrary determination about how many pixels we need. And I do have the occasional horizontal line going on inside of the head of the robot there in the surfboard and in the skateboard as well.
Alright, so what if you want more control than this, what if we except for the moment that Adobe's right, and PNG is the right way to go? PNG is that file format that's going to allow us to create the best looking graphics for Microsoft Office applications. Well, then we should use the Export command. So I'm going to go ahead and Windows tab my way back to Illustrator here. And I'll go up to the File menu and I'll choose Export. And I'll switch from PSD, which is the last file format I used here to PNG. And I'll call this Professional PowerPoint output, let's say.
And I'll specify which artboards I want to export. So I'll go ahead and click on Use Artboards. And as opposed to exporting all the artboards which I could, which will give me separate files, not one big galumphing file, I'll specify a range and that range will be artboard number four and nothing else. Then I'll click on the Save button. And I get a dialog box of options. My goodness, isn't that refreshing? And I can specify that I want a resolution of 300 pixels per inch or something else if I want. And I could set the Background to Transparent.
So I can maintain that transparency, or I could specify White or Black or some other color. So I have a fair amount of options there. How do I want to anti-alias this image? Well, once again, just as in the Save for Web dialog box, I could choose Art Optimize, which is that setting that's been giving me troubles with the horizontal lines, or I could choose Type Optimize, which is going to preserve the hinting that's associated with editable type. Well, I don't have any type inside of this artboard as you can see. However, I don't want to run into those horizontal lines. So I'm going to give Type Optimize a try.
And I'm going to leave Interlaced turned off. Then I'll click OK. And now I'll get another progress bar. And again, Not Responding, whatever, I'll just sort of sit here and cross my fingers and hope that Illustrator is actually going to survive this process. And it does. Alright, so let's go back to the Bridge and then I'm going to scroll my way down to this file right there, Professional PowerPoint output_skate & surf.png, because I exported that one artboard and nothing else. But had I exported the entire document each one of the images would be named for its artboard.
Alright, I'm going to go ahead and double-click on that guy so that we can see it here inside of Photoshop. And notice this is a much higher res file. I'm still getting a few of those horizontal lines which I might have to retouch here inside of Photoshop. But I'm getting much better detail. Check out that circle at the center of the skateboard wheels right there. If I switch back to Big file for PowerPoint.png and I zoom in on that circle, notice the level of detail we have there. Not much, we have a little bit of ghosting around the edges as well, as compared with these beautiful circles right there.
So if you have a mind to create elements for PowerPoint from Illustrator, then don't choose the obvious Save for Microsoft Office command, choose the Export command and save your image as a PNG file instead.
Author
Released
5/28/2010- Creating great art using basic tools
- Brushing and building organic artwork
- Scaling and rotating path outlines
- Creating and formatting text
- Drawing articulated paths with the Pen tool
- Combining paths with Pathfinder operations
- Printing and exporting to the web
Skill Level Beginner
Duration
Views
Q: I was not able to locate my saved shortcuts and cannot locate the folder I created to place the preferences into. The Illustrator steps are clear and using the search function I should be able to find the folder, but it cannot be located. How can I find the shortcuts file on a Mac?
A: To search for the shortcuts file on a Mac, press Cmd+F. Then change the option that says "Kind" in the top-left corner to System Files by choosing "Other" and selecting "System Files" from the menu.



Q: The instructions for installing the dekeKeys don't work on my computer (which is running Mac OS X Lion). Is there an update to these?
A: The dekeKeys distributed with this course will still work for Lion. You just need to add them to a slightly different folder than in previous versions of OS X.
Open a new Finder window and choose Go > Go to Folder. Type the following file path exactly as written below. Copying and pasting may result in an error.
~/Library/Preferences/Adobe Illustrator CS5 Settings/en_US
Move and/or copy/paste the dekeKeys to this folder and follow the rest of the instructions as outlined in the video, "Installing the dekeKeys keyboard shortcuts."
Related Courses
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Deke's Techniques
with Deke McClelland155h 55m Intermediate
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Introduction
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Remapping OS shortcuts6m 56s
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1. Making a Document
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Managing artboards1m 20s
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The Welcome screen3m 49s
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Creating a new document7m 13s
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Advanced document controls6m 52s
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Auto-arranging artboards3m 42s
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Rulers and artboards6m 40s
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Saving a native AI document7m 25s
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Closing all open documents2m 45s
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2. Navigation and the Workspace
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Using tools to zoom and pan5m 56s
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Scroll wheel tricks2m 13s
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The tabbed-window interface6m 17s
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Closing all but one document3m 30s
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Saving a custom workspace4m 57s
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Hiding the bounding box4m 27s
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Keyboard increments7m 15s
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Cycling between screen modes5m 21s
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3. Opening Documents and Getting Organized
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Opening a document5m 2s
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Introducing Adobe Bridge6m 6s
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File-type associations4m 3s
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Previewing and collecting8m 17s
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4. Basic Line Art
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Everything is anything1m 14s
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Meet the line tools3m 30s
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Saving large layer previews5m 50s
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Creating custom guides5m 31s
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Creating a heart using arcs3m 51s
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Adjusting control handles4m 13s
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Drawing a line segment4m 51s
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Rotate, Fill, and Stack4m 37s
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Drawing a looping spiral4m 41s
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Tracing a template layer5m 1s
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Selecting similar objects3m 32s
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5. Geometric Shapes
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The anatomy of a path1m 41s
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Meet the shape tools3m 32s
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Creating a compound path4m 29s
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Drawing rounded rectangles3m 28s
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Aligning to a key object3m 47s
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The constraint axes4m 11s
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Using the Flare tool5m 32s
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6. Paint, Build, and Transform
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Painting artwork from life1m 21s
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Tracing a photograph2m 41s
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Draw, Move, and Duplicate5m 27s
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Rotating and duplicating6m 1s
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Pressure-sensitive input4m 24s
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Using the Shape Builder tool4m 57s
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Establishing design groups5m 54s
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When to rotate vs. reflect4m 55s
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Simulating beveled edges6m 46s
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7. Swatch, Stroke, and Stacking Order
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The Document Color mode6m 20s
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Introducing the Stroke panel4m 46s
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Cap, Join, and Miter Limit6m 42s
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Managing color swatches4m 55s
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Filling paths inside groups6m 24s
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Adjusting the stacking order7m 44s
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Combining multiple fills5m 29s
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Creating a tile pattern9m 2s
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The new CS5 arrowheads5m 44s
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Creating a callout line7m 1s
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Width tool tips and tricks8m 47s
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8. Working with Type
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Next-generation text1m 19s
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Making a margin guide5m 7s
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Offsetting flush-left text4m 47s
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Placing and threading text6m 18s
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Working with point text7m 10s
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Redefining paragraph styles6m 42s
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Using the Glyphs panel6m 41s
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Spell-checking text4m 24s
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Updating a graphic style5m 43s
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Creating type on a path7m 26s
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Adjusting baseline shift4m 18s
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9. Using the Pen Tool
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Moving and deleting points7m 46s
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Editing a path as you go7m 5s
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Faking a spline curve5m 54s
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Adding corners to a spline7m 15s
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How control handles work10m 17s
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Aligning open paths5m 38s
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Splitting and joining paths8m 51s
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Cusp points and miter limits6m 45s
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Using the Convert Point tool4m 42s
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Stacking clipped paths4m 28s
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10. Pathfinder Operations
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Unite closed, join open4m 46s
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Switching shape modes4m 43s
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Adding to a compound shape5m 32s
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Outline Stroke and Unite3m 37s
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Painting in the foliage5m 23s
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Filling in and erasing away6m 31s
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Painting more precise holes5m 17s
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Adding in rough edges7m 53s
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Contouring roots and limbs8m 56s
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Filling in the limbs4m 19s
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Using the Divide operation5m 46s
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11. Printing a Document
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Converting type to outlines8m 55s
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Setting trim size and bleed6m 22s
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Stroking a placed image4m 54s
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Filling in your bleeds5m 34s
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Troubleshooting weak blacks6m 36s
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The General Print options5m 20s
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Placement, scale, and tiling6m 39s
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Trim and printer marks6m 23s
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Warnings and document raster5m 21s
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12. Exporting to the Web (and Elsewhere)
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Saving a high-contrast GIF7m 18s
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The versatile PNG format6m 33s
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Saving a full-color PNG4m 47s
-
Placing an AI Smart Object7m 38s
-
Conclusion
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Until next time1m 33s
-
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Video: Exporting to Microsoft Office and PowerPoint