Creating a professional timeline is easy with Bee Docs' Timeline. This tutorial will take you step by step through the creation of a timeline with three events.
First, find and launch the Bee Docs' Timeline application. By default it is installed in your Application Folder. A window will open with a blank timeline chart. In the View menu, choose "Zoom to Fit" to make sure that you can see the entire timeline without having to scroll.
Click the green "Add" button in the toolbar to create a new event. As an alternative to clicking this button, you could also choose "Add New Event" from the Edit menu or press the Command-N keyboard shortcut. When you add a new event to the timeline, the option drawer is automatically opened to the events tab so that you can easily enter the information for your new event.
Enter a label and a starting time for your event. In this case, the event label is "Apple Computer files for incorporation" and the date is "Jan 3, 1977". Several different date formats are supported for entering new dates, so feel free to experiment with different ways of typing the date. When you exit the starting date field by pressing tab or return, the changes show up immediately on the timeline. Note that you end dates are optional. If you enter an end date a horizontal line will represent the span of time on your chart.
Press the Add button to add a second event to your timeline. Label this event "First Macintosh Release" and assign a date of "January 1984". Notice that as soon as you press return, not only the event changes but the date range of the entire timeline is adjusted automatically. This is Timeline's unique automatic date range adjustment feature at work!
Add a third event labeled "Mac OS X is released" with a start time of "March 24, 2001." Again, the date range and event locations are automatically repositioned to fit nicely on the page. Notice that the first event is raised to avoid a collision between it's label and the second event.
Congratulations, you have added three events to a timeline. Easy Right!? Be very glad that you no longer have to use your page layout software to create timelines from scratch. Next, let's have some fun with the colors, fonts, and size of your timeline...
Bee Docs' Timeline takes care of the positioning and dates of your timeline events. However, I know you want to play around with the look of your timeline, so let me show you how to tweak some of the visual settings.
Click the Timeline tab in the options drawer. Click the color well labeled Background Color to open the Macintosh color palette. Choose a nice dark color like the blue I picked in the screenshot below.
Now the background is a nice blue but the green color of the events is ugly now. To change the event color, first you need to select all of the events (you can use Select All command in the Edit menu). Click the Events tab in the option drawer. Then, click the color well labeled Event Color. Set the events to be white.
OK, now that we have white events, let us change the font. Click the Fonts button in the toolbar to bring up the font chooser. Try a few fonts and notice that not only does the font change, but the layout also updates to reflect new font sizes. After you are done having some fun with your favorite fonts, set the font to Lucida Grande / Bold / 18pt.
You can also change the way that dates are displayed for your events. Click the Timeline tab in the option drawer and set the date format to "Month (Jun 2004)". This will remove the day from the displayed time. Note that each event is still tracked to the second, but only the month and year are displayed in the label.
Finally, let us stretch our timeline out over several pages. Click the Layout tab in the option drawer and click the landscape button to change the orientation of the page. Notice that the date range and position of your events are adjusted slightly so that everything still looks great. Then use the page spanning drop down to make your timeline span three pages. You will probably want to choose "Zoom to Fit" from the View menu so that you can see the entire timeline in all it's glory.
That's it! You have created a timeline, added events, and formatted everything to look cool. Now you can create your own timelines. I've put some more advanced tutorials on-line, in particular there are some great things you can do with timelines when you combine the power of timelines with some of the other applications that you may have on your computer. Be sure to check them out.