Timeline slides

Horizontal rails, for four to seven milestones

A line across the slide with points on it, sometimes alternating above and below, sometimes numbered, sometimes as a road or a staircase climbing left to right. This family reads instantly and holds four, five, six or seven points depending on the layout. Past seven the labels collide, which is why no layout in the family offers more.

Vertical rails, for uneven gaps and longer text

A dotted rail down the left with entries beside it, or phases stacked as rows. Vertical is the better shape when each entry needs a sentence rather than three words, and when the intervals are not even, because a horizontal rail implies equal spacing whether or not that is true. Company histories and project retrospectives usually belong here.

Quarter columns, for a plan rather than a history

Four columns, one per quarter, each holding a stack of bullets. This is the shape for what we will do rather than what happened, because it lets each period carry several parallel items instead of a single milestone label. A phased development table and a quarterly roadmap table do the same job in a grid where the rows are workstreams.

How a timeline differs from a Gantt

A timeline puts one thing at each point in time. A Gantt puts bars that span several periods and overlap each other. If nothing in your plan runs concurrently, a timeline is clearer and gives you far more room for words. If two phases genuinely overlap, and showing the overlap is the point, a Gantt is the right component. Four of the twenty timeline layouts are Gantts for exactly that reason.

Write the labels as outcomes

Phase 2 tells the audience nothing. Pilot with three stores tells them what will be true when the point is reached. The layouts give each point a short heading and a description line, and the discipline that makes a timeline useful is putting the outcome in the heading and the caveat in the description, rather than the other way round.

How it works, in three steps

1. Step 1

   Count your periods first

   Four to seven goes horizontal. More than seven, or long text per entry, goes vertical.

2. Step 2

   Pick the layout from the library

   Twenty are filed under timeline. The picker draws each one with your own content in it.

3. Step 3

   Name the points as outcomes

   What is true when the point is reached, not what stage the project is at.

The full walkthrough with screenshots is in the guide Add charts, maps and diagrams to slides.

Limits worth knowing

• Horizontal layouts top out around seven points. There is no layout for a fifteen milestone rail.
• Points are evenly spaced. The layout cannot represent a two year gap as wider than a two month one.
• A timeline point is a single item. For overlapping phases you need one of the four Gantt layouts.
• The number of points a layout holds is fixed by that layout, so adding an eighth means swapping to a different one.

See it on a finished piece

Company profile presentation

10 slides

Product launch presentation

8 slides

Project kickoff deck

9 slides

Questions people ask

Related pages