Illustrator a poor substitute for Freehand for business users

Question

I have discovered to my horror that Snow Leopard makes it impossible for Excel graphs to be copied into Freehand any longer. This is 90% of the work I do and have been doing for 15 years. Since Adobe would like Freehand users to migrate to Illustrator, I thought I would give that a try to see what would happen.
The graphs paste in, but they are sized above the size of the artboard, creating extra work.
There are also issues with how the text boxes work (if I try to right-justify the x-axis numbers, they move to the left).
In Freehand I religiously use the "Select -- Same as Selection -- Page" command as I complete the charts one by one, to change the strokes to the right weights for publishing and to methodically change the Excel colours to Pantone colours, etc -- all the things Microsoft does not allow for. However, as far as I can tell, when you use the "Select Same" command in Illustrator, it selects everything that matches on every artboard; this means I would have to have 80 separate Illustrator files for the reports I do that have 80 charts! Can anyone tell me if there is a way to select similar objects on individual artboards and not on all artboards at once?
By far the worst problem I encountered is that, when I tried to paste line  graphs into Illustrator from Excel, all but one of the data lines would  disappear -- rendering the charts unusable for my client's analytical  purposes. Freehand never did this; all pasted charts came into Freehandas perfect vector graphics on only one layer.
I used to do these time-sensitive charts in less than a minute each with Freehand's slick capabilities, and I'll be lucky to do each one in less than 30 minutes now -- putting me out of work in short order. For as long as humanly possible, I will keep using Leopard so that I don't have to try to use Illustrator for something Freehand can do 1,000 times better. Why, oh why, can't Illustrator interface with Excel the way Freehand can? Seems like we business users are being left out in the cold by both Apple and Adobe.

Answer 1

Ok here is your new process. There will be little differences on some excel files but they shouldn't be too hard to tackle. Plus I'm always an email or a tweet away at @ask_illustrator
1) Open your .xls in excel and choose File -> Save As. In the Format drop down, choose PDF.
2) Open that .pdf in Illustrator. If it's a multi-page .pdf, AI will prompt you for which page to open.
3) Choose Select -> All or press command+a.
4) Choose Object -> Clipping Path -> Release. Then choose Object -> Compound Path -> Release.
5) Repeat step 4 until both options have "Release" grayed out.
6) Choose Select -> Deselect or just click anywhere outside of the work area with your selection tool.
7) In your Color panel (Window -> Color) change both the fill and stoke colors to none by clicking the swatch (Window -> Swatches) that is white with a red diagonal line through it.
8) Choose Select -> Same -> Fill & Stroke then press delete or backspace.
The previous steps will prepare the artwork for editing and get rid of any un-needed shapes.
9) now select an object that needs to be changed to a spot color
10) Choose Select -> Same -> Fill & Stroke again and in the color panel, drag the color to the swatches panel to add it as a new swatch. Double-click your new swatch and choose Spot Color in the Color Type drop down menu.
Any other clean up should be pretty obvious, just remember to use select same fill & stroke to grab similar shapes quickly.
Welcome to AI!