I've been busy!

I spent many hours the last few months writing and recording 2 brand-new courses for Lynda.com, and completely updated and re-recorded an existing course. All 3 courses have now been released. Check them out!

In InDesign Scripting Made Easy I’ve created a course for InDesign users to learn how to obtain, install, use, create, and modify scripts to help automate repetitive design and production tasks. Every InDesign user should watch this course!

In InDesign: Fixed-Layout EPUB Interactive Techniques & Publish Online I show how to add a wide variety of interactive effects to InDesign documents that will be output as either fixed-layou EPUB or Publish Online projects. I show how to create slideshows, animation, quizzes, audio and video, buttons that trigger actions, and much more.

My popular Up and Running with Dropbox course has been viewed by thousands since I released it in April of 2014. Since the initial recording, a lot has changed in Dropbox-land, so I updated and re-recorded the entire course. Think you know how to use Dropbox? Watch the course, and I can almost guarantee that you’ll learn something!

How to save each Illustrator artboard to a separate AI file

A customer asked me about this recently, and for some reason I had forgotten how to do this. So I thought I’d write it down here in hopes that it might help someone else.

The problem: You have an Illustrator file that contains multiple Artboards, and you want a quick way to save each Artboard as a separate .AI file.

The solution: Simple. Just choose File > Save As, and in the Illustrator Options dialog box, select Save each artboard to a separate file.

 

If your Illustrator file is named “MyIllustratorFile”, when you save the artboards, they will be named MyIllustratorFile-01.ai, MyIllustratorFile-02.ai, etc.

I think I had trouble finding this because it only shows up when you do a Save As, or the first time you Save a new file. I guess I was expecting some sort of an export artboards command or something instead. Anyway…its simple, and pretty obvious when you look in the right place!

This ability goes back at least as far as Illustrator CS6, maybe even further. Also, when you choose File > Export to output to png, swf, jpg, psd, tif, or svg, you have the opportunity to output each artboard to a separate file.