Tutorial: Making Parallel Timelines

Bee Docs Timeline for Mac OS X makes it easy to create historical timelines with multiple rows. Multiple rows can show the relationships between historical events or future events. This tutorial will show you how to create a timeline with multiple rows.

This tutorial expands on the concepts that we introduced in the Getting Started tutorial. If you haven’t read the Getting Started tutorial, we recommend that you do so before continuing with this tutorial.

Creating the Timeline

Launch Bee Docs Timeline and select “Bluesy” as the “Look” and “Blank Document” from the bottom row. You will see the standard Bee Docs Timeline window.

A blank timeline

Entering Historical Events

For this timeline, we want to show the lifespans of Renaissance musicians in one timeline row and Renaissance artists in second row. Let’s start with our Renaissance musicians. First, we need to find the data for our timeline. A search of Wikipedia found these musicians:

You can add these historical events to your timeline by using one of three methods:

  1. Clicking the “Add” button in the toolbar
  2. Selecting “Add Event” from the Edit menu
  3. Pressing the Command-E keyboard shortcut

After adding an event, Bee Docs Timeline opens an edit box for you to enter your event information.

Bee Docs Timeline sets a default event label to “New Event” and sets the default start date to today’s date. You will need to change these defaults to display the label and date of your own historical event.

Press the Command-E keyboard shortcut and enter the name and dates for each musician.

Timeline with three Renaissance musicians.

Because we will be comparing two timeline rows, we should identify each timeline row by changing the label to reflect the content of the timeline. double–click on the text titled “UNTITLED ROW” at the base of your timeline row. In the box that appears, type “MUSICIANS” and then click on your timeline row to close the text box.

Changing the row title of a timeline to say MUSICIANS.

Creating a New Timeline Row

Now we need a new timeline row to show our Renaissance artists. Press the Command-R keyboard shortcut. Bee Docs Timeline will create a new timeline row on top of your first row.

Entering Historical Events in Timeline Row 2

Before we can enter events in row 2, we need to find data on Renaissance artists. A search of Wikipedia reveals the following artists:

With this data, we can enter the Renaissance artist information into our timeline. First, click on the top timeline row to select it. You’ll notice that Bee Docs Timeline highlights the date line in row 2 to signal that this timeline row will accept your new events.

Selecting a newly created timeline row.

Enter the information for our Renaissance artists into timeline row 2 and change the row label from “UNTITLED ROW” to “ARTISTS”.

A timeline of Renaissance artists and musicians.

You have successfully created a timeline with multiple rows that show the lifespans of Renaissance musicians and artists.