Stop making timelines in a word processor

Google Docs, PowerPoint and Excel do not make timelines. They make boxes you nudge into a row and re-nudge every time something changes. This is a line, and things sit on it where they belong.

Open Jim’s Timeline

Works in any browser. No account, nothing to install.

  • No account
  • Nothing to install
  • Vertical or horizontal
  • Years, minutes or steps

Why a timeline in Docs is so much work

Because nothing in it knows what a timeline is. Every box is a shape at a position you chose by eye, so a gap is whatever the spacing happens to be, a long event and a short one look the same, and moving one thing in the middle means moving everything after it by hand. Add a date you forgot and you start the row again.

If you came looking for a template

A timeline template for PowerPoint, Google Docs, Word or Excel is somebody else's drawing of a timeline, and you inherit the drawing along with the work of keeping it true. The dates are decoration: nothing in the file knows that one event is longer than another or that two of them overlapped, so every change is yours to make by hand. A template was always a way of coping with not having the thing itself. This is the thing itself, and there is no account and nothing to keep.

What this does instead

The line is real

You say what one step is worth, a year or a minute or just a step, and where the first one starts. Everything else is a number on that line. Put an event at 1994 and it is at 1994, not wherever it landed.

Length means duration

An event is as long as it lasted. A war that ran six years is six units of line; a day is one. You can see which things overlapped without anyone drawing a bracket to say so.

Two things at once go side by side

Strips run parallel down the same axis. Her life on one, the wars on another, the books she wrote on a third, all against the same years.

Down the page or across it

The same timeline, turned. Down the page reads well on a phone and gives long titles room; across suits a wall or a slide. It is one control, not a rebuild.

Change the scale afterwards

Decide later that your steps were really months. The labels change and nothing moves, because events were never stored as pixels or as dates.

Who it is for

  • A history teacher who wants one image of a century, not a slide of boxes.
  • A student with a project due, who has been fighting a text box for an hour.
  • Anyone writing a story who needs to know what their character was doing while something else happened.
  • Anyone laying out a plan in steps, where the steps have lengths and some of them run at the same time.

Questions

  • Open it and start putting events on the line. You set what one step means and where the line starts, then press anywhere to add something. There is no template to pick and nothing to align by hand, because position on the line is the data rather than a place you dragged a box to.

  • Not quite, and it is worth saying why. A PowerPoint, Excel, Word or Google Docs timeline template is a picture of a timeline that somebody drew once, and you keep it looking right by hand: the boxes are a fixed number of shapes at fixed positions, so adding one event in the middle means nudging everything after it. This is the timeline itself. You say what one step is worth, put things on the line, and the layout follows. There is nothing to download and nothing to keep tidy.

  • You label the line. A line of years can be labelled with years. Underneath, everything is plain numbers on purpose, which is what lets you change the scale later without your events losing their place, and what keeps months of unequal length and time zones out of a drawing tool.

  • Yes, and that is what strips are for. Put things that happen at the same time on strips beside each other and they line up against the same axis.

  • Either, and you can switch. It is the same timeline seen along a different axis, so nothing has to be rebuilt to see it the other way.

  • No. Your timeline is saved in this browser on this device. There is nothing to sign into and nothing to install.

  • Not yet. Today it is a page you can look at and screenshot. Export is a known gap rather than a hidden one.

You already know what goes on it

Open the line, put the first thing on it, and stop pushing rectangles around a page that does not know what any of them mean.

Open Jim’s Timeline