Create graphical assets using excel data

[Developers Vault]

This may have been answered somewhere but I was not entirely sure on how to ask it.  It's not that complicated, just hard to explain.

We produce home & garden shows in Texas, I am the graphic and web designer for the shows. My question is about our show guide.

  On the back page we have tiles for our featured exhibitors which shows a logo, booth number and contact information.  There will normally be around 50 of these tiles on the page.  Each show I get a spreadsheet with all of the info that goes into the tile and then I manually type it all in there and rearrange them in alphabetical order.  This is obviously very time intensive and if for some reason there is a change then I have to go back and rearrange them again to either remove or add a new tile.

Is there some way for me to feed a CSV file to Illustrator and it creates the tiles for me and places them on the page?

Also - I know a lot of you may be asking why am I doing this in Illustrator and not Indesign.  Simple answer is that I was tasked to learn products when we first started and had to do it within months, I chose Illustrator because it was closest to Photoshop and created all of our assets in there.  I simply have not taken the time to learn Indesign.

[Kurt Gold]

There are variables in Illustrator (see Variables palette) and with some assisting steps you may achieve at least a bit of what you want to do.

To elaborate, it would be helpful if you were able to provide some sample data.

[Developers Vault]

Here is the table of one of the exhibitors:

LOGO     Company Name     Contact     Phone     Booth Number

Then there is a small rectangle/square that shows their logo and contact information with their booth number up in the corner.

[Stephen Marsh]

Variables are much easier in InDesign as they can use a comma/tab delimited file, however in Illustrator one has to have an XML formatted file, which is probably beyond the skills of the majority of users… However there is hope! Vasily Hall has created a fantastic free “Variable Importer” script for Illustrator, which will automatically create the required XML data from a standard comma/tab input file.

Adobe-Illustrator/VariableImporter.jsx at master · Silly-V/Adobe-Illustrator · GitHub

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Silly-V/Adobe-Illustrator/master/Variable%20Importer/VariableImpor...

I have a 7 part tutorial on my blog:

Prepression: Illustrator – Introducing the VariableImporter Script

Note that this is for the early version of the script, it has changed a lot in the GUI over time, however the basic concepts explained in my blog series still apply.

In addition to my blog posts that were created when the script was in it’s infancy, John Garret has created some video tutorials (free on YouTube or subscription based on Lynda and LinkedIn Learning video sites):

Illustrator Variable Data - The EASY way! - YouTube

http://hypertransitory.com/blog/2016/05/01/adobe-illustrator-variable-data-new-variable-importer/

[Developers Vault]

Thank you very much, I will take a look at the links that you provided and see if I can get some insight on how to make this work.  May just have to invest the time into Indesign and start using that. 

Thank you again Stephen.

[Ton Frederiks]

Here is another resource that converts data into an XML that Illustrator can use:

Free Online Illustrator Variables XML editor and converter

[Stephen Marsh · Accepted solution]

Thanks Ton,

I link to that page on my blog listed above - other options include:

http://www.monolinea.com/using-variables-illustrator/

http://www.illustrationetc.com/AIbuds/VariablesFTROU/JETVariablesFTROU.zip

http://hypertransitory.com/blog/2014/05/27/use-adobe-illustrator-variable-data-xml/

http://joaofaraco.com.br/converter/

http://shancarter.github.io/mr-data-converter/

[Ton Frederiks]

Hi Stephen,

that's a lot of links to look at!

Thanks

[Stephen Marsh]

I now consider them historical footnotes :]

[Silly-V]

Indesign is mostly for variable-data publications where you're more streamlined into the standard variable-data workflow where the objective is to output a variable set of documents from the main template - but what sounds like in your case is you are more concerned with updating the current document instead of creating new child documents.

I think the VariableImporter would solve your workflow issue here well, unless I'm not seeing something.

Since you said there's 50 tiles in a 'page', and each 'tile' is a component which requires its own variable-creation, you will see that the VI provides several options for the most malleable workflow for your needs.

• In one options you can simulate the InDesign route and output all of the individual tiles, then run it again with another spreadsheet to replace and correctly arrange the generated tiles in the main graphic.
• As a different option assuming that the amount of the tiles doesn't change much, you can have each of the records entered into Illustrator as variable data to affect 50 components inside the one document - so you only need to run it once with one dataset. The thing is, you'll probably need to transpose the data such that you've got a whole bunch of variables but only one very long row.

Either way, your Illustrator workflow would have the advantage of freedom in editing your working AI document rather than having to create an Indesign merged document / pdf output. It's just more spreadsheet-centric and is more like standard-shift driving (which is the best, and soon to be forgotten ).

By the way, in disclosure: I created the VI , with Stephen's help of course, and I'm also in Texas! The D/FW area.

Make sure to view this easy tutorial (which Stephen already mentioned, I just noticed ) by John Garrett: Illustrator Variable Data - The EASY way! - YouTube

[Ton Frederiks]

I love your script. There used to be an Apple script that was included with Illustrator, it took a text file, created the xml and exported the result as PDF files. I used it to demo the Variables feature of Illustrator together with text effects using the Appearance panel.

But that script stopped working a long time ago.

Yours is a very good (better) replacement.

Thanks