Page History

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You'll see the visualization editor and a preview of your timeline. Now we need to add your spreadsheet to the editor. Find the "Source of events" field and click on the triangle Google Drive icon next to it. You'll see a list of your Google Drive accounts. Log in to the account that holds your data spreadsheet. 

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First, set "Center date of timeline." 1800 seems like a good place to center the timeline. According to the Visualization Index, however, this field should be in the DD/MM/YYYY format. We'll pick an arbitrary date and enter "01/01/1800" in the field.

Since your students fill in the events, you won't see any information on the timeline. You might also notice that the range of times in the window don't suit your needs. You want the timeline to show all the dates your students add at first view. 

First, set "Center date of timeline." In our case, we checked UVA Magazine's timeline of the ouster and realized that events happened in a window between June 8, 2012 and June 29, 2012. Therefore, we centered the timeline on June 18, 2012. Since according to the visualization index you use a DD/MM/Year format for "Center date of timeline", we entered 18/06/2012.

However, the scope of the timeline still isn't quite right. The ouster happened over the course of a month, but we are zoomed out to the level of years in the timeline. We can adjust this scope using "Initial zoom of timeline." Since the value of this field is tricky to determine, we'll create two reference events for the "beginning" and "end" points of our timeline, then adjust the value of "Initial zoom." 

First, go back to the spreadsheet. We're going to create two events – one with a startdate of June 8, 2012 and one with a startdate of June 29, 2012. We'll call the first event "start" and the second event "end." Don't worry about names too much – these are temporary reference points, and we'll delete them at the end. 

Now go back to the visualizations editor. Adjust the "Initial zoom of timeline" by small increments, increasing the value to zoom out, decreasing the value to zoom in, until you can see the "start" and "end" events at the opposite ends of the timeline. Now you can be sure all your student events will be visible in class. Remember, you can always zoom in and zoom out on the finished timeline. This method just helps you set the general scope. 

To finish, make sure that "Minimum zoom of timeline" and "Maximum zoom of timeline" are considerably smaller and larger, respectively, than the initial zoom value. This lets your students scroll in and out

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That looks a lot better. Now we can see all the events in the default view. 

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The timeline still isn't very informative, however – how will viewers understand the significance of the letter to Dr. Priestly, for exampleevents? Let's make the visualization show a description of the event, which we entered in column B of our spreadsheet. 

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To do this, change Show the description from false to true. Now when a viewer clicks on an event, a description will pop up. 

Now we're done.

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