New Feature: Timeline view

Timeline View’s labeling capabilities are excellent, hope to see them added to Calendar and Gantt too!

• Not only can you use a field other than the Primary Field to label records, you can use multiple fields to label records.
• You can bold, italicize, or underline the fields used as labels

• When you expand the record height you can control whether record labels are shown as list or on top of each other

This is a great addition to the integrated views and, like @Kamille_Parks mentions, going the extra mile usability wise :raised_hands: :ok_hand:

Thanks for listening. :slightly_smiling_face:

This looks perfect for my plant life cycle and garden project - thanks so much!! Can’t wait to check this out today.

Can someone provide me with the key differences between timeline and gant. At a glance, they look similar.

Gantt

• Each record is its own line and all records that are “somewhen” will be visible in the sidebar
• You can show dependencies between records
• Collapsing a group summarizes all records in that group as one long “event” using the earliest start time and latest end time

Timeline

• More record label flexibility
• There’s no sidebar, records aren’t visible unless they’re in your displayed date range
• Collapsing a group doesn’t summarize the records into one bar

Awesome addition to views… would be even better if there was a summary count of the number of records one a date at the top of the column

Thank you for this suggestion! I’ve made sure to pass it along to the team and hope to follow up soon :slightly_smiling_face:

This is incredible! And @Russell_Findlay’s suggestion would be a major help in spoting resource issues.

@Jordan_Scott1, thank you for the detailed update! It is truly a joy to see Airtable investing in the community through your fantastic engagement.

Hopefully I can convince my organization to start using Airtable again with all the recent updates!!

I’ve spent some time this morning sitting down with the new Airtable Timeline view - and was so very happy to see it working with my rolling calendar formulas. Below is a screenshot from my garden project, which reads off of actively growing plants that are detailed within a plant dictionary. The below timeline shows what’s in flower.

And below is how I structured my rolling date table, seems to work well. My only complaint would be that it’s a 6 months past/future system, and that anything beyond that date range doesn’t exist. I’m not too sure how Airtable devs could implement recurring date periods, but I would absolutely subscribe to that methodology if it existed!

Thanks again Airtable!! Awesome to finally see this.

EDIT: Worth mentioning, I’ve asked Airtable support this morning to consider adding reoccurring dates features, considering now that we have both Timeline and Calendar views. There’s a couple of ways they could go about implementing reoccurring dates, one idea would be “Yearless” dates, or, year-year range dates, so that;

15/06 - 25/07 would be a reoccurring date in both past and future to infinity of 15th June to 25th July
15/06/2020-2030 - 15/07/2020-2030 would be a reoccurring date that occurs between the years of 2020 through to 2030.

An example below of where reoccurring dates are desperately needed - it would allow me to represent seasons (and other very useful reoccurring things, such as when to sow, when flowers bloom, etc);

EDIT: Quick update, without reoccurring date functionality, I’m seeing if record keeping each yearly event will work/scale… it might, I will just need to find time to build it and see.

Thanks for the constant progress!
Is there going to be also a daily range view?

I love the timeline so much. Would it be possible to set it to show custom date ranges, or min-max? It’s useful to be able to see an entire project in a glance. I’d also love to be able to pivot it and see it vertically instead of horizontally. I’ve actually just done a novel planning session and got very excited showing everyone the timeline feature and the massive gap in the middle of my novel plan where nothing happens .

DUDE! +1 vote from me for this. this is genius. idk if its possible. but if it is, its genius. in the meantime I use datetime_format(today(), ‘06/15/YYYY’) But that just changes the year to the current year. not particularly intuitive.

Why is info so scattered on this site (a problem with other sites also). Why is the info here different from here, and not exactly the same?: https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408658892567-Timeline-View-Overview

Info should be centralized into one helpful place. All this scattered info is making the info on all the different things very confusing. Whoever is in charge of all this, please fix all this and centralized all the info. Thanks!

Also hope that outdated info are updated and moved to a centralized place.

So I finally got round to test out the Timeline view and I am loving it so so much :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: I am a huge fan of visualizing my work-related as well as personal plans so this is really up my alley. Ok, so my Airtable records are all organized. Now I might consider organizing my acutal life, hahah :grinning_face_with_sweat:

Anyway, great job, you guys! :pray:

This is a community forum. Real people who power use the product provide the content here. Not airtable.

As @Rebecca_Elam pointed out, you are comparing a support site that is owned, controlled, and curated by Airtable – with a freewheeling conversational site designed for fast and flexible assistance and thought-provoking collaboration. These are two fundamentally different ideas that each serve unique purposes.

Yeah, like the Internet, right? :winking_face: Um, wrong. The reason the Internet works so well is partly because it is the opposite of centralized. Can you imagine the human capital required to curate every message in this community such that it is non-redundant with easily discoverable topics and fast navigation to answers? Tens of thousands of hours perhaps and who would pay for such an investment?

Yahoo tried this in 1994 (and failed by 2004) to organize and centralize the Interwebs. Google ate their lunch with a search model that embraced the chaos. This is precisely why I harvest all of the important communities (to me) and use ElasticSearch to find the context (and data) that I want.

In my view, information should not be centralized; rather, it should be surrounded by smart systems that transform it into knowledge. Literally, this information should find you when you need it most.

I can’t seem to figure this out. I’m not sure how to get the labels to wrap. I’m sure that I’m missing something easy.

The team is actively working on improving this experience to make it more intuitive, but right now if you set “row height” to be “medium” or taller, and set “label orientation” to be “horizontal,” it’ll wrap on individual parts of the label (not on a single line of text).

Excellent! Hopefully they can fix it so that thumbnails display too (instead of the image location string) - and perhaps even nest an image within the label left/right justified, so it sits in front/offsets of the label text, or appears at the very end of the timeline entry label on the far right as users scroll through their timeline as there’s a lot of empty/blank label space there that would frame an image perfectly.

Thanks. On short duration records, it would be nice to have a even a single label wrap. Better than nothing though!!

It would be great if we could include choose multiple date fields in the Timeline view. This exists in the Calendar view, but it’s limited to 30 days. I’m interested in seeing a full year using a timeline view instead of a calendar view.

I’m liking this so far. The only issue I’m running into is that I tend to have a lot of single day events in my timeline view, and it’s hard to see what exactly those events are unless I zoom all the way in to the Week view. Even hovering over the event doesn’t give me a lot of info—just the name of the event, the start date, and the duration. It would be great if I could see that info, plus the info I’ve chosen to include under “Customize labels.” As it stands, it’s pretty clunky to have to zoom all the way in to get the info I need.

This feature would be especially helpful when events have more info than can fit in the bar and have to appended with an ellipsis.

Another possibly weird idea/request: What if there could be a way to, instead of creating a swim lane for when the timeline is grouped by a shared field, copy the event so it appears in every group it’s associated with. In this example I made, it would be great if instead of there being a “Person A, Person B, Person C” swim lane, those events could just appear in all 3 lanes. It would look like there are more events then there actually are, but it would be an accurate representation of all the events in each group. As it is, it’s hard to gauge what’s actually in group A, B, or C.

Seconded! @Jordan_Scott1 Adding support to visualize multiple sets of dates would work wonders for my team and be a great bridge between the date flexibility of Calendar view and the functionality of Timeline view.