Drag-and-Drop Not Working in Adobe Illustrator

One of the handy features within Adobe applications (not to mention most apps these days) is the ability to drag items from one document to another. But one glitch may occur when doing this in Adobe Illustrator. You may see the following alert pop-up when this happens.

This frequently happens because there are guides within the group (or groups) that you are dropping into the new document. As you are dropping the group in the new document Illustrator is being told that a new element is coming in that wants to go beyond the maximum artboard area. I say 'frequently' because that alert doesn't always pop-up. Sometimes Illustrator let's you go beyond the max artboard area. Sometimes this alert can be avoided if you have 'Paste Remembers Layers' checked in the Layers panel. But there doesn't seem to be any steadfast rule for when and why this happens.

The best thing to do is to always delete your guides after using them or before dragging-and-dropping. Ideally, as a common practice, you should delete any guides (View > Guides > Clear Guides) that are no longer needed. The inclusion of guides also adds to the file size. They don't add much to the file size, but deletion of the guides is one step towards a smaller file size.