New Google Sheets Timeline Creator

Creating a timeline is a great project for students. Timelines can be used to show historical events, or things that happened in the student's own life, or stages in scientific processes, or details about a character's journey in a book, and so much more.

Thankfully there are lots of excellent tools out there for creating timelines. Some good recommendations include:

• The timeline template from Flippity - www.flippity.net/Timeline.htm
• The "diagram" tool in Google Slides and Drawings which has a timeline template
• Timeline JS from Knight Lab - timeline.knightlab.com/
• The timeline template from Sutori - www.sutori.com/en/blog/timeline-template
• And many more!

Well now there is one more to add to that list. Google Sheets has now added an official timeline creation tool!

With this new feature it is super easy for students to create and share interactive timelines right in Google Sheets that include titles, descriptions, dates, links, colors, groups and more.

See below for a tutorial video on how to use this new timeline tool, as well as written directions. As always, I would love to see what your students create, and learn from you with new ideas on how this could be used.

Note: The timeline tool is available for anyone with a school account (or work account) but not for personal accounts. This is a new feature, so it is still rolling out for some schools. According to Google, the rollout schedule is:

• Rapid Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on November 2, 2022 
• Scheduled Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on November 16, 2022