Now that your basic timeline is outlined, you can customize its overall look by changing its primary color theme from the Change Colors dropdown menu or by selecting a different style from the SmartArt Styles section.

A better alternative would be for you to expand the graphic box, which will automatically make the texts larger too. Note: Manually increasing the text size for improved readability may ruin the entire layout of your timeline. This is why a maximum of 7 milestones is recommended to make sure that your data remains legible. The more events you add, the more the text size will shrink. To insert extra events or deliverables on your timeline, simply press Enter after an existing milestone label inside the Text Pane. This is why we recommend leaving them as they are.

You have the option of manually dragging them closer or farther from one another, but the graphic will get distorted as you add more items. Note: Since Word is not able to automatically calculate time intervals between milestone dates, your milestones will be placed at equal distances on the timeline regardless of the number of days between them. To show a milestone’s date below or above its description, you can insert a line break using Shift + Enter. You’ll find that updating the default graphic is much easier this way than entering your data directly in the input fields on the timeline.Įnter your milestone dates and descriptions inside the Text Pane - the graphic will be automatically updated. Once Word has generated your basic timeline, open the Text Pane by clicking on whichever of the two areas bordered in the image below.

If you want to try out different layouts for your timeline, you can always change the style and colors from the SmartArt Design tab on the ribbon. You have a variety of options to choose from, but for a simple timeline that shows the main milestones of a project, we’d recommend going with the Basic Timeline, which you can see bordered below. Select the Process category within the window that pops up and pick the graphic type that you want to use for your Word timeline. Select the Insert tab and click on the SmartArt button in the Illustrations section. To do so, go to the Layout tab on the Word ribbon and click on Orientation. Open a new Word document and change the page orientation from Portrait to Landscape, which will make room for more items to be placed on the timeline.

Downloadable history timeline template