Once you’ve opened up your graphic, you should organize your content into layers and groups, which are collections of related elements. They allow you to quickly edit, move, or ignore that content all at the same time.

Splitting your elements into new layers

This is broken up into two videos. The first video starts from the beginning, the second video starts in the middle of things.

  1. Make sure the Layers window is open by checking to see if Window > Layers has a checkmark by it.
  2. Select the content you’d like to group together - for example: all your bars, or the legend, or the axes.
  3. Click the New Layer button on the Layers window, the one at the bottom that looks like a folded sheet of paper.
  4. Double-click the new layer to rename it to something descriptive.
  5. With the new layer selected, go to Object > Arrange and then select Send to Current Layer.
  6. Click the eye next to the layer’s name to toggle the layer off. This helps check to make sure you moved everything you thought you did.
  7. Repeat steps 2 through 6 on any other content.

Layer Separating, Video 1

Here I click and drag to select the legend, then move it to a new layer.

Layer Separating, Video 2

Here I use Select > Same to pick out the axes before sending them to the new layer. It’s very important to hide the layer when sending elements around using Select > Same - if you selected something you didn’t mean to and sent it to the new layer, you’ll see it disappear as it’ sent to the new layer.