How to easily create a timeline in Google Sheets

In this post, we’re going to look at how to create a timeline in Google Sheets, which automatically creates a timeline from a set of data.

Action plan

A common use of this is to visually see the actions in a project action plan across a period of time. Below is a simple action plan and we have a number of actions, with the person responsible for each one, the start and finish date of each, and the status of the actions.

Note, I’ve used conditional formatting to colour the people and the status and as we’ll see later these can be reflected in the timeline.

Select the cells you want to include in the timeline, in this case, A2:E15.

Create the timeline

Select “Timeline” from the “Insert” menu.

The next step will confirm the data range you’ve selected. You can edit here if you need to. Click “OK”.

This will create a new sheet called Timeline and a number.

As you can see below, it’s created the timeline based on the data.

Change the timeline settings

On the right, you have a number of settings, to edit the timeline.

Select data range: You can edit the data series here.

Start date: If you want to include a start date, select the column letter which it’s in, for example, column C.

End date or duration: Similarly, you can add the end date or include how long the action will take.

Note, you can use a timeline with only one of these dates, if you just want to show a single date and not a period of time for the actions.

Card title: This is the title next to each of the cards. Here, I’m using the actions column as each card is an action.

Next, you have some optional settings.

Card colour: You can colour your cards based on the colours that are in the columns of data. For example, here I want to highlight the status of each action with a colour, so I select column E.

As you can see, the status of each action is clear.

If I change the colour to column B, this will show the person responsible for each action.

Card details: You can add extra details to the card, by selecting a column of data to add.

For example, here I’ve added the person responsible for each action.

Card group: You can group the cards by options in a particular column. For example, here I’ve grouped them by the person responsible, so it’s clear who needs to do what and when.

Timeline view options

There are also more options on the bar above the timeline. These change the timeline view.

The first option is to change the time period in the timeline window.

Here, I’ve changed it to Months and it shows this month and has a vertical line dividing up the cards into months.

You can also change how much data is shown on the screen. There are two options, “Comfortable” (card title and details on separate lines) and “Condensed” (title and details on single lines).

In “Condensed” view it looks like this.

You can also zoom in and out to show more or less data by changing the zoom percentage.

As you can see, it’s a simple yet powerful way to view your date-related data.

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