Flow or organization charts in Illustrator 10

[Stanley]

Hi everyone,

I need to do a project involving a flowchart (or organization chart).

I would like to do this in Illustrator 10. The one thing that
Illustrator does not seem to have is the ability to make quick, linked
charts the way that Visio does.

I suppose I could produce the chart portion in Visio and import that
into Illustrator. Then I could do the rest (wording and other graphics)
in Illustrator.

So my question, please, is whether this is the best course of action.
Am I correct in believing that you cannot create linked flow or
organization charts in Illustrator?

Thank you.

Stanley

[Doug Winger]

In article <476bcde4$0$16108$4c36...@roadrunner.com>,
Stanley <sm...@usm.maine.edu> wrote:

Illustrator can be convinced to make nice charts and graphs, but not of
the type you're looking for; at least not automagically. It'll do bar
and pie charts for you, and quite nicely too, but flowcharts are
another animal altogether.

Your stated plan of using Visio- which I understand handles flowcharts
quite well- and then polishing the results in Illustrator sounds like
the way to go. I'm not sure if you can directly edit Visio's output in
Illustrator, but if nothing else, you'll have a guide at hand.

Of course, doing it "by hand" isn't all that hard if you're a decent
driver of Illustrator, though this is case rather like using a
screwdriver when a hammer would work better and vice versa. Which
approach is best would depend strongly on the details planned and
number of elements you'd be working with.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help here. I've done flowcharts in
Illustrator in the past, but they were rather simple in layout so
rolling them by hand wasn't that onerous.

- Doug

[Stanley]

Hi Doug,

OK, thank you very much for the nice complete answer. At least now I am
sure of what Illustrator can and cannot do.

Stanley

[Stanley]

Hi Doug,

Actually, let me ask you one more question.

I once heard that Macromedia Freehand allows the drawing of
flow/organization charts, and that this program can easily be integrated
into Illustrator.

Do you know if this is correct?

I really enjoy Illustrator, now that I am beginning to get the handle on
it. But the lack of flow/organization chart-drawing is a real problem
for the kind of graphics that I often make.

Thanks.

Stanley

[Doug Winger]

In article <476f2694$0$11089$4c36...@roadrunner.com>,
Stanley <sm...@usm.maine.edu> wrote:

> I once heard that Macromedia Freehand allows the drawing of
> flow/organization charts, and that this program can easily be integrated
> into Illustrator.
>
> Do you know if this is correct?
>
> I really enjoy Illustrator, now that I am beginning to get the handle on
> it. But the lack of flow/organization chart-drawing is a real problem
> for the kind of graphics that I often make.

Personally, I know of nothing like that in the versions of Freehand I've
used, though those were earlier versions. I do know that Freehand shares
the ability to do charts and graphs along with Illustrator, but both
are/were restricted to data-type plotting and graphs rather than
relational charts. The "latest and greatest" version might be able to do
flow/organization charts, but I haven't checked and can't be sure.

I'm afraid that I've done little Illustrator work producing the sorts of
charts/graphs you seem to be interested in. The approach I took, the few
times I dealt with that sort of thing, was to build template objects
that could be duped, arranged and then edited as needed, with the
relationship path lines added afterwards. A little planning made it
mostly a matter of duplicating a grouped object with offset- the repeat
duplication meta-D hotkey and arrange tools making it quite quick and
accurate- laying down any necessary additional lines and then editing
the text field in each element appropriately.

Again, sorry I couldn't be of more effective help here.

-Doug

[Stanley]

Hi Doug,

OK. Thanks for your reply. I'll consider everything you said.

Stanley

[Stanley]

Hi Doug and anyone else,

But one more thing. Is it possible that Illustrator CS3 has the
capability of drawing organization/flow charts with connectors?

Do you happen to know?

From what I am reading, it is possible that it does.

I am still using Illustrator 10. If CS3 has what I need, then I would
upgrade.

Thanks again.

Stanley

[rays...@googlemail.com]

"I once heard that Macromedia Freehand allows the drawing of
flow/organization charts, and that this program can easily be
integrated
into Illustrator. "

The answer is yes it did from around version 9. It was very handy!

Its a shame that that this is one of the good features Adobe decided
to remove in the aquisition of Macromedia and in loosing Freehand to
Illustrator!

Ray