PPOL 646 - Data Visualization Updates with Illustrator

You have several options when you first open the graphs you exported from R. I would recommend taking a few steps before starting to manipulate and update your graphs. 

• Before doing any updates save your PDF exported from R as an Illustrator file. From the menu at the top, file and save as and choose the Adobe Illustrator .ai extension. PDFs will maintain the layer structure of your exported file, but it is good to have an original file you can fall back on if needed. 
• Open the Layers Panel and look at all of the objects, groups, and clipping masks your graph is made up of. Hover and click around with both the Selection and Direction tools and see what is grouped. This will give a sense of how much work you will have to do depending on how many objects you would like to update. 
• Delete any empty objects that may have come across in your export. Generally, this is the bottom-most Clipping Group. If you delete your graph or any part of it, you can undo this either under the menu at the top or command/control + Z. 

You have a few ways you can approach updating your exported graph from R. As mentioned in the previous area above, I would recommend taking a look at your Layer panel to see the complexity of your Clipping Groups and Objects. Some can be more straight forward with objects being topmost with a few Clipping Groups joined together. Others may have Clipping Groups within other groups and will take a lot of back and forth between your graph and the Layers panel to identify what is nested within each other. 

Below there are two approaches to updating and organizing your graphs. 

Grouping:

The first approach is keeping your Clipping Groups and objects together. Through this approach, you will use the Direct Selection tool to individually select objects you would like to update and change through the Appearance panel. Holding the Shift key as you select will allow you to select multiple objects. Alternatively, you can use your Layers panel to select individual objects in the Target Column. Again the Shift key will allow you to choose the objects you would like selected. Once you have all of your objects selected, you can make simple edits like color, rotation, etc. Clipping Groups can be renamed to help you identify your object groupings quickly. 

While this approach to updating may be a bit simpler, it will take additional time to go back and reselect your objects if you need to make any additional updates. 

Ungrouping to Re-Group:

The second approach to updating your graphs is to ungroup all of your Clipping Groups and Masks until every object is on the same layer. Once you have done this, you can use the Selection Tool and select and delete objects you don't need, but also select objects you want together and regroup them. In addition, you can rename these groups in order to quickly and easily identify them. This process takes more time upfront but will allow you to make updates and edits quicker in the future.