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Here, we're making a simple spreadsheet.
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| Enter all required labels at you need on the top row of the spreadsheet. These are: - title
- description
- startdate
- enddatelink
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You'll leave the rows themselves blank. In class, each student will add a row to the spreadsheet, creating a single event. Before they can do that, however, you should make sure rows are formatted correctly.
3. Format your spreadsheet
If you pull up our Timeline reference guide, you'll see that the first row you filled out contains data labels. We need to “freeze” this row. "Freezing" helps Audio-Video read the data you entered.
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To freeze the first row, click View in the top menu, then Freeze. Choose 1 row. A gray line will appear under this row. |
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The Timeline reference guide also has specific data types for each column. Luckily, our example is easy: every column should be in the "plain text" data type.
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| To set the data type, select your column. Click Format from the menu, then Number. Choose Plain Text. Do this for each column. |
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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 dondoesn't suit your needs. You want the timeline to show all the dates your students add your student's events at first view.
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of the ouster and realized that events happened in a window between June 8, |
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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 |
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of timeline", we entered 18/06/2012. |
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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 timelineof 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."
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First, go back to the spreadsheet. We're going to create two events – one with |
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a start date 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. |
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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.
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| Here are the values we ended up with. Notice we also had to adjust "Center date of timeline" by a few days. |
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To finish, make sure that "Minimum zoom of timelineof timeline" and "Maximum zoom of timelineof timeline" are considerably are considerably smaller and larger, respectively, than the initial zoom value. This lets your students scroll in and out.
That looks a lot better. Now we can see all the events in the default viewNow you can be sure all your student events will be visible in class. Remember, you can always zoom on the finished timeline. This method just helps you set the general scope.
The timeline still isn't very informative, however – how will viewers understand the significance of events? Let's make the visualization show a description of the event, which we entered your students enter in column B of our your 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 |
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. In the example, we've also entered the "Title of timeline." |
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Now we're done .
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This is what your timeline should look like. |
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with the main visualization.
Remember, you can find out more about the different options for your timeline with the Visualization Index.
To finish making your timeline, give the visualization record a title in the "Title" field at the top of the page, then choose Public under the "Visibility" options at the bottom of the page. Making the timeline public lets you add it to UVaCollab in step 8.
Save your visualization. You're all ready for your class to create a collaborative timeline together.
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