In this exercise, I'm going to show you how to work inside the Tabbed Window Interface, in which each and every open document appears as a tab at the top of the screen. Now to a get a sense of how this interface behaves you need to have multiple illustrations open. So here's what I did I took the Welcome again.ai file and I'll press Ctrl+Alt+0 or Command+Option+0 on the Mac to zoom Out. So that we can see all of its Artboards and I went ahead and exported the first five Artboards because we didn't need the sixth one, the one that includes all the others, the first five Artboards, I saved as independent documents.
And here's how I did it. I went up to the File menu and I chose the Save As Command or you can press Ctrl+Shift+s or Command+Shift+s on a Mac and I went ahead and called this document In pieces.ai, like so and you can see the various In pieces documents that I've saved inside of the 02_workspace folder. I will go ahead and click on the Save button and it inside the Illustrator options dialog box, I actually decided to go with an older version of the format, I sometimes do this to make sure my files are as accessible as they can be, but if I were to save this file as an Illustrator CS file the way it is with these many Artboards then what Illustrator will do quite wisely I think since Illustrator CS did not support multiple Artboards is it will draw guidelines around where these Artboards used to be.
So at least if you make this bonehead maneuver and you didn't mean to this in this and this is your only version of the file, you can come back in and re-draw your Artboards around the guidelines. So it's pretty smart but anyway here's what I want to do I'm going to Save each Artboard to a separate File and I just want the first five. So I'll change my range value here to 1-5 and then I'll click OK and then what Illustrator does I am not going to do it right here in front of you because the work is already done. Illustrator goes ahead and calls each one of these illustrations In pieces_ whatever the Artboards name was, and you may recall that we not only had the In pieces_welcome.ai Artboard but we had an In pieces_inactive.ai and In pieces_continue.ai, In pieces_join.ai and In pieces_close.ai named after the various Pen tool cursors.
Now I can switch between them by clicking on any one of these tabs which I figure is pretty self-evident. You can also switch between the various open illustrations by pressing Ctrl+Tab here on a PC or Command+Tilde on the Mac and the Tilde key by the way is that wavy character to the left of the 1 key just above Tab on an American keyboard. Now you maybe wonder why this big difference between a PC Ctrl+Tab and a Mac Command+Tilde. Well it's an OS level thing so it's the difference between Windows and the Mac fundamentally.
Notice that I cycled around once I got to the last illustration I cycle back to the first one and so on. If you want to move backward through the list you press Ctrl+Shift+Tab like so or Command+Shift+Tilde on the Mac you can also incidentally changed your view if you go out to the range documents icon in the Application bar and click on it you'll see that you have a variety of different ways to view your illustrations. For example, if I choose 2 up, then one of those illustrations is going to break out into an independent window, in this case Illustrator chose the last document close.ai and the others are all going to be consolidated in this first window and you can switch between them by clicking on this double arrow icon right there and choosing a different illustration.
For example, I going to go with Inactive.ai lets say for the red version of the illustration and then you can go and scroll both of these panes so that you can see them onscreen. In my case however, I am going to go ahead and switch to yet a different way of looking at my illustrations. I'm going to grab this guy right here by the title bar and I'm going to drag it and drop it in a random area and now we'll go ahead and display this illustration in an independent floating window and notice that the floating window can float in front of everything, in front of panels they can float up here in front of the menu bar and of course you can do this with as many windows as you like.
I could grab this guy right here and drag him out from the group as well. If you want to add a window back to the group, I will go ahead and drag this 1 down a little bit here. All you need to do is drag it in like so and you'll you see a blue outline around the group of consolidated illustrations and drop it in the place and it becomes consolidated as well. If you want to consolidate all of the illustrations no matter what then you go up to Arrange Documents and you choose this Guide, Consolidate All and they're all back together again. Now they are kind of out of order though, notice that, so I'm going to click on In pieces_welcome.ai and let's say for what ever fussy reason, I want this guy back where he was in terms of the order of the windows.
Then I'll go ahead and drag this Tab back like so and drop it in the place so that we have welcome.ai again then In pieces_welcome.ai then In pieces_inactive.ai, In pieces_ continue.ai, In pieces_join.ai and In pieces_close.ai, in exactly the same order I opened them in a first place. If you want all your windows to float you can go out to the window menu choose Arrange and choose Float All in Windows and then after that point notice that Cascade is currently dimmed. That's because it doesn't work unless you have floaters. So I'll go ahead and choose Float All in Windows and then you have the Option of either Tiling the windows or cascading them, up to you.
You can also Consolidate them once again which really I think helps maintain a less confusing interface, but of course this is a matter of personal preference. One other thing I want to show you I'll go the Window menu choose Arrange and choose Tile which does work with Consolidated Windows and notice that creates a Tile display right here, so that you can see bits and pieces of all of your illustrations at once. Unfortunately, you'll need to scroll them independently in order to see what's going on, but notice that you're devoting very little room to window elements, so that you can see as much of each illustration as possible and just align things up.
So that we can see each one of these illustrations, I will Click inside each illustration and I'll Press Ctrl+0 or Command+0 on the Mac in turn as you see me doing right here and now we'll go ahead and Center each and every one of these displays. That's how you work with a Tabbed Window Interface here inside illustrator CS5.
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 5m 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
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Placing an AI Smart Object7m 38s
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Conclusion
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Until next time1m 33s
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Video: The tabbed-window interface