TIMELINE

Credit: https://thetimelineproj.sourceforge.net

Nick Peers reveals how to gain a chronological view of both historical events and personal projects with this powerful free tool.

OUR EXPERT

Nick Peers has a history degree, yet his mother always says “That’s why I sent you to university” when asking for tech advice.

W hat better way to visualise history than with a timeline? Whether you’re looking to chart the progress of a project, or delve into your family history, a timeline can provide you with a clear visual guide, revealing everything from the length of time it took to complete certain tasks to which ancestors’ lives overlapped with each other, and by how much.

You can, of course, create timelines using design software, but why do that when there’s a dedicated tool – conveniently called Timeline – to make the job as easy as possible? Timeline provides you with all the tools you need to make visually attractive, informative timelines with the added bonus of being able to add extra details in the form of additional descriptive text, web links and even a small image to aid the viewer on their journey.

NAVIGATING YOUR TIMELINE

1 Change view options

Use these buttons to determine the orientation (left or centre) of both event descriptions and timeline links.

2 View sidebar

Access options for filtering the timeline view by both category and label.

3 Events

Each event is shown in a colour-coded box (according to its category) that displays its title.

4 Event description

Roll your mouse over an event to view a description (and optional image) as part of a pop-up tooltip.

5 Event options

Right-click an event to access additional options and shortcuts related to that event.

6 Timeline position

By default, the timeline sits in the middle of the screen – use this slider to move it up and down as you require.

Timeline is available through snap, which means if you’re running Ubuntu 18.04 or later, you can access it through Ubuntu Software – search for ‘timeline’ and it should be the fourth entry on the list of results (and crucially the only one called ‘timeline’). The latest version – 2.5.0 at time of writing, but likely to be 2.6.0 by the time you read this – should be offered.

Once installed, open Timeline from the Launcher. It should open to a blank Timeline offering you a shortcut to the ‘Getting started tutorial’, which is basically an example timeline that serves as an introductory tutorial. If it doesn’t appear, or you want to refer back to it later, choose Help>Getting started tutorial to open it.

You’ll see how events are displayed in colour-coded boxes according to the date or time span you assign to them. Hover over selected boxes and you’ll see tooltips appear, providing you with a whistle-stop tour of the program’s key features. Don’t worry, we’ll cover everything mentioned here in this tutorial.

Time keeps on slipping

For now, let’s create the first timeline from scratch. Choose File>New and you’ll be given a choice of timeline types. Gregorian is the traditional date-based timeline, but you can also create timelines with simple numeric or decimal points instead of dates, and access different types of calendar, from ancient Egyptian (Pharaonic) to fictional (Bosparanian).