Important: Date Formatting Change to TimelineJS (May affect Google Spreadsheet Timelines)

[Zach Wise]

In the latest version of TimelineJS we changed how dates are read so that you have more control over how that date is interpreted. TimelineJS now has precision dating.

For example: 

If you enter 2000 in the date column, it will read as 2000. 

01/2000 will read as January, 2000 and 

01/01/2000 will read as January 1st, 2000. 

This might affect some of your existing timelines. The fix is pretty easy though, just fix your dates.

If you're using Google Spreadsheets as your source, you may run into an issue when you try and fix your dates. The date column in the older versions of the template were set to format the dates as mm/dd/yyyy tt:tt. So you type in 2000 and the spreadsheet reformats it to read 01/01/2000 00:00. 

To fix this, just select the date columns and click "Format > Number > Plain Text". (see the screenshot below).

[osul...@gmail.com]

Thanks Zach!

[Davis Stegmanis]

Is it posible to make the timeline reverse? So newer events ar shown at beggining and going into past ?

[Sam Laney]

Hey all, I also had to 'remove data validation' when I updated my google doc template. If you're getting a little red triangle in the corner of your cell, try removing the data validation to get it to take mixed data formats (1/13/2000 and 3/2000 for example).

[bai...@sfasu.edu]

I've got this to work for Start Date, displaying a month and year or just year.  In the End Date column in my spreadsheet, if I just put in a year it will drop it in the time line at January 1st, whatever year I put in.  And ideas why this might be happening?