I would be interested to hear about people's experience of using Timeline software in Genealogy and any recommendation on product. I am writing a book on my family history and want to include timelines that are relevant to the respective chapters. What I don't want is the bland individual/family timelines that packages such as FTM produce. I want to produce attractive, graphical timelines tailored to the content of each chapter. I have tried out scatter charts in Excel with decent results. I downloaded the Timeline add-in to PowerPoint then to find it does not handle dates prior to 1900, so that's no good. I thought about Tiki Toki but it seems the free version only allows one timeline and the "Desktop" version only works on Apple (I have Windows 7). SmartView looks good but a bit expensive. There seem to be a number of other packages out there, but it's hard to know what to go for. So can anyone recommend anything?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Hello Russell
I have never tried to do exactly what you are trying to do but I have read about other people who have taken the output from some commercial family history software and then edited it in some desktop publishing or graphics software. Whilst some of that type of software can be very expensive there are some free downloads you can try on the Serif web site. These will generally be slightly older versions but still perfectly usable and you can always buy the latest version if they do what you want.
Your point about problems with dates before 1900 is also a problem in spreadsheets because they were designed on the basis that day one was 1 Jan 1900. To get round this problem it is much safer to enter dates (especially those before 1900) with the day, month and year each in its own column then if desired the three columns can be concatenated into a single column formatted as text (not as date) for printing.
There is a Genealogical Computing list on Rootsweb so it might be worth searching through the Archives (bottom of the page) to see if you can find any similar problem/solution.
Mike