This guide walks you through making a dynamic timeline in Mandala Visuals. We'll show you how to set up your spreadsheet, then use that data in Visuals. Then, you'll use customization settings to make your timeline look the way you want. The final timeline will look something like this:
- Create a Google Spreadsheet
- Format your spreadsheet
- Log in to Visuals
- Connect your Google Drive to Visuals
- Create a new visualization
- Invite student contributions in class
1. Create a Google Spreadsheet
Visuals pulls data from your Google account to make visualizations. To start making a timeline, put your data into Google Sheets.
First, go to docs.google.com. You'll see the Google log in page.
You can use any Google address as the account. Remember, UVA students have "@virginia.edu" addresses that work with Google Drive.
Enter your email, then click Next.
Log in with your Netbadge credentials. You'll see the University of Virginia Google Drive page (or the standard Google Drive page if you entered a non-UVa address).
Click New, then Google Sheets to make your new spreadsheet.
This is where you will enter your data. Before you start that process, however, you should make your spreadsheet accessible to Audio-Video. To do this, click Share in the top right corner.
Then, Get shareable link. This automatically turns on link sharing.
The default setting restricts sharing to UVA viewers. We need to make a few more changes so anyone with a link can access your data. If you're not using a UVA Google Drive Account, simply change Anyone at with the link can view to can edit. Then you can skip ahead to the next section.
First, click Anyone at UVa with the link can view. You'll see extra options. Click More to see all privacy options.
Choose On - Anyone with the link, then Save. Click Done to finish adjusting privacy settings.
Now you're ready to enter your data.
2. Enter your data
At this point, you should pull up our Timeline guide for quick reference. This tells you how to format your data so Visuals can read it. In general, you'll use individual chart guides in our Visualization Index to find out about formatting.
Here, we're making a simple spreadsheet.
Enter all required labels at on the top row of the spreadsheet. These are:
- title
- description
- startdate
- enddate
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.
To freeze the first row, click View in the top menu, then Freeze. Choose 1 row. A gray line will appear under this row.
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.
To set the data type, select your column. Click Format from the menu, then Number. Choose Plain Text. Do this for each column.
Now your spreadsheet is ready for student contributions. Next, you can move to Mandala Audio-Video to set up the basic visualization before class begins.
4. Log in to visuals
Click on the Main Menu icon (
) in the top right corner. Then, Log in via Netbadge.
Enter your Netbadge credentials to finish logging in. Now we'll make your visualization.
6. Create your timeline
From the Visuals homepage, Create a visualization.
Choose Relationships, then Timeline.
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.
Google will ask if you give Shanti permission to see your files: click Allow. You'll see a Google Drive window in Visuals with a list of your files.
Select the spreadsheet you made in step 1.
You'll see a preview of your timeline in the editor. Now we'll use the options in the sidebar to customize your timeline.
First, we'll add a title in the "Title of timeline" field. Here, we've entered "Jefferson at UVA"
The default timeline view doesn't show all the events. You can see that the events "Last Visit" and "Building the Rotunda" are cut off on the left, while there is plenty of empty space on the right. Let's fix that.
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.
If you want to set a specific day, you would use the month/day/year format ("01/25/1800").
That looks a lot better. Now we can see all the events in the default view.
Let's add a title in the "Title of timeline" field.
The timeline still isn't very informative, however – how will viewers understand the significance of the letter to Dr. Priestly, for example? Let's make the visualization show a description of the event, which we entered in column B of our spreadsheet.
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.
This is what your timeline should look like.
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 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.
Save your visualization. You're all ready for your class to create a collaborative timeline together.
7. Invite student contributions in class
For the class, you should have a way to project your visualization.
Before the class, ask your students to bring:
- their laptops,
- a title for their event,
- a URL source for the event,
- a description of the event.
Share the timeline spreadsheet with your students. To do this, you should use the URL of the spreadsheet at Share > Copy Link. If you've followed the spreadsheet setup process correctly, all your students need is the URL of the document to edit it.
In class, you can ask each of your students to add their event in a new row of the spreadsheet, like so:
You'll see the timeline grow gradually, giving your students a sense of how information flows through time.
You can make this timeline available to your students after class in UVaCollab.
8. Add the timeline to UVaCollab
Open your class site in UVaCollab.
Go to Resources in the sidebar.
Find the folder where you want to add the timeline. Next to the folder's name, click Actions, then Create HTML Page.
An editing tool will open.
Now you need to fetch your timeline from Visuals. To do this, open the visualization then click the Share icon. From the window that opens, click iFrame. This tab contains HTML code that will let you embed your timeline directly into the new UVaCollab HTML page. Copy the code and return to UVaCollab.
To insert the code into the page, you need to switch the UVaCollab editor mode to edit HTML. To do so, click Sources <> from the editor toolbar. Then, paste the code from Visuals and Continue.
Fill out the fields as needed, then Finish. The new page will appear under the Resources. If you click on the site, you'll see the interactive timeline your students created collaboratively.
Now you're finished with your project. To learn more about making visualizations, you can use this Visuals in Mandala guide.