Transcript:
When you’re having some difficulty with Adobe Illustrator as I’m having here, you can see it’s behaving really strangely. I’m using the rectangle tool. I’m getting this blue flashing screen when I try to draw and it seems to be like zooming in and zooming out. This is really strange, so the first thing that you want to do when you’re trying to reset and troubleshoot a problem like this is to go and reset your preferences and to do this. You just go into your preferences. Go to the general pane and then at the bottom here is a button to reset the preferences. Now you will have to restart, so lets. Just click OK and I can tell illustrator to restart now and that I don’t want to save my current work because I didn’t have anything there that I was working on. And now Illustrator has gotten rid of that preferences file that could be the root of my problem and we’re restarting the program. We can click on the recreate new button and just create a quick document here to see what we can do. Grab my rectangle tool. And that seems to have fixed my problem now. If this doesn’t fix your problem, you might need to uninstall and reinstall illustrator before we do that, though. Let’s save our settings. In case we lose them in the process, we can import them back into illustrator. So to do this go to edit. My settings and export settings and illustrator creates a settings file. Its name has a time and date stamp. You can name this, however. You want and then just save it in a place where you can find it later. If you find later that you need to import this settings file, just go to the same command in the menu, edit my settings and this time, choose import settings and we get a dialog box, telling us these will replace the current settings and restart illustrator. From here. You’ll be able to locate that settings file on your system and install it settings. Files contain your custom Workspace’s, color settings, custom width profiles and more so most of your preferences will also be saved there as well, so that’s a lot worth saving The settings file is specific to the version, so you cannot, for example, install your version 24 settings in version, 25 of illustrator. Okay, so now that you’ve got your settings saved, Let’s go back to uninstalling and reinstalling illustrator? First thing you need to do is quit illustrator. Not going to save and then make sure that you go to the creative cloud desktop version here where you can see all the programs that you have installed and as you can see the versions that I have installed now are there’s two of them here. What I have right here is the brand new version 25.0.1 and then below that I have 24.3 so creative cloud allows you to keep old versions of the software available to you on your system, and I recommend doing this because when you have a problem with a new install of illustrator, it’s really nice to have one that you can just go back to especially if you’re in the middle of a project or a deadline and you just need to get back to work and you want to deal with troubleshooting later, so right now? This is the version that’s giving me problems and I’m going to go over here to this little three dot menu and look at other versions. This just gives me some helpful information, so as we already saw, I have 24.3 already installed and then there’s an older version of illustrator 25 that’s available that I can also install if I want to. And then this is the one that is the problem for me, so I’m going to go ahead and uninstall it just clicking on that uninstall button and then it asks me about my preferences before we uninstall this app. Tell us if you’d like to keep or remove notifications, alerts, settings and other preferences. So this is important here in my case, I’m going to remove these preferences because I don’t want to carry over anything that might have been corrupted or causing problems, so I’m going to choose remove. If I weren’t having so many problems with illustrator, I might just save those and not choose to remove them, but I have my settings file. I can import to get most of those preferences and other settings restored later. So this way I get a totally fresh install. Now that I’ve uninstalled, I’m going to go to other versions here and I can see where the previous version of 25 is available and I’m going to go ahead and install that. So now what I’m doing is I’m just going back one version to give me a working copy of the latest version of illustrator, so I can get back to work and maybe call tech support later when I have a little more time and it’s great to know I still have version 24 available. If this version still gives me trouble so to sum up when you’re having trouble with Adobe Illustrator, reset your preferences and you can do this in preferences and then click on that reset preferences button. This will require that you restart illustrator, and I also suggest restarting your computer as we’ll just leave no stone unturned. If that doesn’t work, you can uninstall and reinstall illustrator using the creative cloud desktop app and finally check to make sure that your operating system is up to date that you haven’t missed any security updates. Go ahead and take care of that. And if none of these things work, then it’s probably time to contact Adobe Illustrator, help and tech support. Alright, so I hope those tips have been helpful and that they get you back up and running quickly. If this video was helpful to you, please give it a like and share it. I’ve been using and teaching Adobe Illustrator for many years and I always appreciate new viewers and followers. My name is Lara Coyle. Thanks for watching.