Timeline Maker

About the Timeline Maker

List what happened and when, and the page draws a timeline: a dot for a moment, a bar for something that lasted, labels that keep clear of each other, and a year axis. Dates can be as exact or as vague as your sources: 1969-07-20, 20 July 1969, July 1969, 1969, 44 BCE or c. 1450 — years before 1 CE are handled properly, so a timeline can run from 753 BCE to today.

Choose proportional spacing, where the distance between events is the real time between them, or even spacing, where every event gets the same step (better when one date is centuries from the rest). Lay it out across the page or down it, give events categories and pick a colour for each, and paste the list in from a spreadsheet if you like. With a pass, download SVG, PNG or PDF or print it; without one, the timeline on screen is a free preview with a MySmartCoPilot watermark across it. Everything is drawn in your browser; nothing is uploaded.

Common uses

• A history assignment: the events of a period, printed or dropped into a document.
• Project phases and milestones on one line for a status slide.
• A biography or company story for a presentation.
• A reading or revision plan laid out by date.

Dates it understands

• Full dates: 1969-07-20, 20 July 1969, July 20, 1969, 20/07/1969, and year first as 1969/07/20 or 1969.07.20. If a number could be either the day or the month (03/04/1999), the Day before month switch decides; it starts the way your country writes dates. A two-digit year is read as 1930 to 2029, as Excel reads one, so 6/6/44 is 1944 and 5/1/26 is 2026; write all four digits for any other year.
• Partial dates: July 1969 or 1969 alone. A bare year is placed at the start of that year; its label stays “1969”, so nothing claims to be more exact than your source.
• Years before 1 CE: 44 BCE, 44 BC, 44 B.C. or -44 (a minus sign means BCE); AD 1066 and 1066 CE work too, and large years can be grouped by thousands, as 10,000 BCE or 12 000 BCE. There is no year 0: 1 BCE is followed by 1 CE, so the gap between them is one year, and ticks across the boundary come out right.
• Approximate dates: c. 1450, ca. 1450 or circa 1450 are placed at that year and labelled “c. 1450”.
• Spans: fill in Ends as well, or paste 1914–1918: First World War. A span that ends with a bare year runs to the end of that year, so 1914 to 1918 is a bar of five years, not four.

Anything that is not a date is reported with the row number and the reason — a day the month does not have, a month name that is not English, a year 0 — so a long pasted list never fails silently.

Proportional or even spacing

Proportional puts each event where it belongs in time: gaps show how far apart things really were, and the axis gets round year ticks. Even gives every event the same step, which suits a list where one date is far from the others (a founding date centuries before the rest) and keeps every label readable.

Across the page, labels alternate above and below the line; when two would still overlap, the later one moves out to a further row, and the page says the timeline is crowded. Then choose even spacing, a longer line (it scrolls sideways on screen and keeps its full size in the downloads), the Down layout, or turn the notes off. In the Down layout, every label sits to the right of the line, and a label that needs the room moves down with a bent line to its event.

Colours and downloads

Each category gets its own colour; under Colours you can choose a different one for any category, and for events without a category. The ten colours stand out at least 3:1 from the background in the light and the dark look, as the accessibility guidelines ask for lines and marks.

• SVG is the original drawing: sharp at any size, with the text as real text, and editable in vector software such as Inkscape or Illustrator.
• PNG is drawn at twice the size on screen for a crisp result in slides and documents. Very large timelines are scaled back to stay inside what browsers allow for a picture; one that would have to shrink below half size is not made as a PNG, and the page points you to the SVG, which has no size limit.
• PDF is one page: A4 or US Letter (your country’s paper unless you choose), turned to suit the timeline and scaled to fit, or exactly the size of the timeline.
• CSV holds the events themselves (date, title, end, category, note) so you can edit them in a spreadsheet and paste them back.

Downloads have a white background whatever the page looks like; Download options gives a see-through PNG and SVG (for coloured slides) or the dark look instead.

Limitations

• Events are placed by date; the page does not draw dependencies, swimlanes or a Gantt grid with weekends.
• No images or icons on events.
• There are ten colours: with more than ten categories, colours repeat (the legend still names every category).
• Times of day are not used: the smallest step is a day.
• Years run from 1,000,000 BCE to 1,000,000 CE; geological time in millions of years is out of range.
• A very crowded timeline needs even spacing, a longer line or the Down layout; the page says when labels had to move out.
• Your events are saved in this browser only; download the CSV to keep a copy.

Privacy

Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.