Editing Timeline Charts

What's in a Timeline Chart?
Timeline Settings

Timeline Tool Panel
Editing Bar Content
Adding and Deleting Bars

Resizing a Timeline
Optimizing the Height and Width of a Timeline

Moving a Timeline

Font for the Chart Legend

Color in Timelines

Editing Objects in Charts (Boxes, Colors, Lines, etc)
Finding Somebody in a Chart
Going to the Family View From a Chart

Perspective Events

As explained elsewhere, a timeline chart depicts the lifespans of people as horizontal bars, similar to a Gantt chart.

What's in a Timeline Chart?

The fundamental element of a timeline chart is a bar. A bar is a horizontal rectangle whose length portrays the lifespan of a person. The beginning and end of the bar delineate the person's birth and death years. The person's name appears to the left of the bar.

In a timeline chart, the X axis shows a range of years. The Y axis has a list of people in the timeline chart. The collection of people included in a timeline chart is specified in Reunion's Charts > Timeline panel. After a timeline chart appears, you can edit the chart in many ways.

Timeline Settings

The overall settings that apply to a timeline chart are located in one place — the Timeline Settings window. To get there, choose Timeline > Settings. The choices you make in the Timeline Settings window will become the default settings for new Timeline charts.

You can also open this window by Control-clicking any bar on a timeline chart and choosing Timeline Settings.

Span

The labels along the top of a timeline chart (its legend) identify the span of years in your chart.

When a timeline is first drawn, the minimum span of years is determined by the birth/death dates of people in the chart. That is, Reunion attempts to display a span of years that includes everybody in the chart — from the earliest birth year to the latest death year (or the current year, whichever is less). You can't show a smaller span, although you can show a larger span. If bars are deleted from a timeline chart, the span of the legend is automatically adjusted. To adjust the span, use the First year and Last year buttons in the Timeline Settings window.

Click here to learn how to change the font, size, and color of text in the legend.

Sorting Bars

To sort a timeline chart, choose Timeline > Settings and use the buttons under the Sort by label.

Timelines may be sorted in five different ways...

(The Descendants button will appear disabled unless the timeline chart was created with the Descendants of current couple button checked.)

To reverse the sorting, check the Reverse order button.

To duplicate the effect of multiple sort keys, simply sort more than once by different keys. Put another way, to sort by more than one criteria, select the sort fields in the reverse order of the desired order. For example, to sort by age and birth date, sort by Birth date and then sort by Age.

Timeline Grid

The timeline grid refers to an array of vertical and horizontal gray, hair lines behind the timeline bars. (The timeline grid is not the grid of dots described here.)

Timeline Tool Panel

To edit the attributes of bars in a timeline chart, select one or more bars and use the tool panel buttons that appear on the left side of the chart. The collection of tools that appear in the tool panel depend on the selected object(s).

Bar
To change bar height, bar color, bar border depth, and/or bar border color, select one or more bars and use the tool panel menu buttons in the Bar group. The maximum bar height is 63 points. The depth of bar borders can be from a hairline to 2 points. A setting of None represents no border.

Gradient
A "gradient" is a color fill that gradually blends from one color to another. To apply a gradient to bars, select one or more bars and use the tool panel Gradient button (within the Box group of buttons). The Gradient button does not appear when a selected bar is transparent.

Shadow
A bar shadow is wrapped around the bottom and right sides of a bar. To change the shadow depth and/or color, click one or more bars and use the Shadow Color and Shadow Depth menu buttons. The depth of bar shadows can be from 1 to 7 points. A setting of None represents no shadow.

Text
To change the font, size, color, and style of text in a timeline chart, select one or more bars and use the tool panel buttons under the Text label, shown above.

Other Objects
Attributes of other objects (including perspective events) in a timeline chart use various tool panel buttons as explained here.

Editing Bar Content

To edit the content of a bar (name, sex, birth/death dates), double-click a bar to open the Bar window, or select a bar and choose Timeline > Bar Content.

Name
The name of the person associated with a timeline bar appears in the Name field in the Bar window. You can edit the name if necessary.

Birth Year, Death Year
The width and position of a bar depends on the birth and death years. These dates originally come from the information in your family file; however, you can change them after the chart is created, if necessary. Changing the dates here does not affect data in your family file.

Estimated Birth Year
If a person in a timeline chart has no birth date, Reunion will estimate the birth year, based on the death date. The estimated date will be the death year minus the Living Age value.

Timeline bars for people with estimated birth years have a diagonal beginning.

No Death Year — Living or Estimated
If a person in a timeline chart has no death date, Reunion will assume the person is still living, unless their life span is equal to or greater than the Living Age value, in which case the death year is estimated based on the birth year. The timeline bars for people who are still living or whose death dates are estimated will have a diagonal ending.

Adding and Deleting Bars

After a timeline chart is created, you can't add a bar to the chart.

Bars can be deleted like other objects in charts. Deleting bars in a chart does not affect any data in your Reunion family file.

Resizing a Timeline

To resize a timeline chart, click and drag in the lower-right corner of the chart.

Optimizing the Height and Width of a Timeline

To optimize the height of a timeline chart, choose Timeline > Optimize Height. This menu command attempts to reduce the number of pages (in height) required to print a chart. It does this by reducing the amount of vertical space between bars.

If you want the width of a timeline chart to span a particular number of pages, use the Timeline > Set Width submenu.

Moving a Timeline

To move a timeline chart, click and drag the legend. Or, click to select the legend and use the arrow keys on the keyboard. (It's easier to click and see the legend if the chart is zoomed out.)

Font for the Chart Legend

When the legend is selected (as shown above), you can change the font, size, and color of text in the legend, using the menu buttons that appear in the tool panel.

Color in Timelines

The color attributes of one or more bars may be changed by selecting them and using the tool panel buttons. However, colors can also be applied globally to the bars in a timeline chart. The Colors window lets you select a series of colors that automatically repeat every one to ten bars of a chart. To open the Colors window, choose Timeline > Colors.

To select colors for different bars, click one of the little bars on the left side of the window. The buttons on the right side let you choose colors for bar fill, bar border, bar shadow, and text. (Note: the Gradient button affects all bars.)

Unchecking the Text button will permit changing the bar colors without altering the text color.

The Presets button includes several default color schemes. The Repeat button sets the size of the repeating color cycle — from one to ten bars.

The little bars can be dragged up/down to change their order.

The choices you make in the Colors window will become the default color settings for new Timeline charts.

Saving Default Attributes for Timeline Charts

The choices you make in the Timeline Settings window will become the default settings for new Timeline charts.

The choices you make in the Colors window will become the default color settings for new Timeline charts.

Other attributes of bars in timeline charts can be saved as defaults for new charts (these include text font, bar border depth, bar border color, bar gradient, bar shadow depth, etc). To do this...

  1. Click a bar in a timeline chart.
  2. Set the attributes as desired using the tool panel.
  3. Choose Object > Save Default Bar Attributes.

More information about defaults for charts appears here.