Is there a way to calculate the area of a shape?

Here's an alternative method that might work better for some shapes. (It's not quite as neat as Terri's.)

Make a PDF of the artwork, and open it in Acrobat 7 Pro or Acrobat 8 Pro. Open the Measuring toolbar (View > Toolbars > Measuring). Choose the Area Tool. Drag around the shape, creating a polygon. When you close the shape, the area will be displayed.

There are fancier things you can do (there's are Measuring (2D) and Measuring (3D) preferences panes), and you can actually export measurements to an Excel spreadsheet. This is designed for industries like Architecture.

Holy super cool batcave method. That's awesome!

I am so stoked about this tip. Thanks so much!

Select the path
Cmd-Shift-Option-F12 to open the secret programmer's debugging palette
In that palette, scroll down until you see a section called "object tree"
Click on the 'path' label that is in bold-face (which indicates the object is selected)
The "objects" section above will then display various data about the path, including its area in square pts. Negative areas indicate counter-clockwise paths, positive areas are clockwise.



If the object you wish to measure is not near the top of its layer in the stacking order, you may wish to duplicate it to the top via Copy, deselect, Paste in Front, since it can be hard to find lower-down objects in the debug palette window.

Warning: This palette is not supported. It intentionally does not process many notifications, and can therefore cause crashes if you leave it open while editing the document, especially edits that delete objects which it is displaying data about.