The pleasures and pitfalls of graphs

- 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,…