Edit a Timeline Chart

This article is intended to walk a user through the process of editing a Timeline chart. If you have not done so already, please read through:

Create a New Chart

to create the blank Timeline chart which we’ll learn how to customize and alter in this article.

The menu on the left gives a series of drop-down menus to begin segmenting your data in the visualization. The choices in the drop-down menus correspond to the columns in your spreadsheet.

For example, when using this spreadsheet:

Here are the options available in the drop-down menus:

Now we can start manipulating our visualization!

The first drop-down menu is DATE. This will determine the horizontal positioning of your points, as well as the initial range for the timeline.

As a note, dates from the spreadsheet must be in “YYYY-MM-DD” or “YY-mmm-DD” format. Note that "MM/DD/YYY" is not a a valid option.

As a default, dividing lines show up to mark each year, and each point is grouped by their year. This option can be altered from YEAR to QUARTER or MONTH.

By clicking on either of the dialogue boxes below DATE, the start and end of the range of timeline can be altered.

For example, shifting the start date past some of the data points will cause some of them to disappear.

Clicking the left outlier checkbox will bring those data points back to the visualization.

Clicking on any of the bars brings up all the information for that row.

Next up are the GROUP, SHAPE, and COLOR options, which allow us to visually associate different bars. GROUP does so by changing the vertical positioning of the dots.

COLOR and SHAPE also allow us to visually associate different dots, but do so without changing their vertical positioning.

The COLOR option comes with default values for the colors. However, these can either be altered two different ways. One is by clicking on the color square, bringing up the color selector tool:

The other is by manually entering a comma separated list of hex color codes:

The last thing we’ll add to our visualization is data labels. There are two options: LABEL and SUBLABEL. These work practically identically, with SUBLABEL's default position being below LABEL.

There is one remaining option at our disposal: FILTER. Filtering our data won’t change the relative placement or appearance of any bars, but instead will remove data we’d like to filter out.

PADDING and SPACING have no effect on the relationships between data points, but how they appear. PADDING maintains the positions of the centers of the dots while changing their size. SPACING changes the distances between the centers of dots, but maintains their size.