If your team doesn’t need full-blown project management software, Google Sheets is handy for tracking the status of your projects. It becomes even more useful when you use its timeline view.

This function adds a tab to your spreadsheet that shows you the major tasks or stages of your project as a series of cards arranged by start and end date. Adding a timeline to your spreadsheet provides a robust way for you and your co-workers to see and track your project’s milestones.

In this quick guide, we’ll walk you through how to set up your spreadsheet to enable the timeline view, how to interact with the timeline, and how to edit it.

In this article

• Who can use timeline view in Google Sheets
• How to format your spreadsheet for timeline view
• How to create a timeline
• How to edit your timeline
• How to add a background color to a card

Who can use timeline view in Google Sheets

All paid Google Workspace Business and Enterprise plans include timeline view in Google Sheets. Timeline view is not available via free Google accounts.

How to format your spreadsheet for timeline view

If your spreadsheet has at least one column of data in date format, you can view it as a timeline. But to use this feature to its fullest capabilities, your spreadsheet should contain at least three specific elements: a name, start date, and end date or duration for each task or project stage. (For simplicity’s sake, we’ll just say “task” from here on.)

We’ll demonstrate here with an extremely simple project spreadsheet with column headers clearly labelled for timeline view. You can also apply timeline view to an existing project-tracking spreadsheet, as long as it has these basic elements.

Howard Wen / Foundry

To get started, create or modify a spreadsheet to align with the following specifications:

1. Each row should represent a task.

2. It should have columns for the following data:

• Card title: The name of each task. Each item in this column will become the title for a card in timeline view.
• Start date: The date for when the task starts. Use the date format for these cells.
• End date and/or Duration: The spreadsheet must have either an “End date” or a “Duration” column, or you can include both if you wish. The cells in an end date column should contain the deadline for completion of each task in date format. The cells in a duration column should show the amount of time that the task is scheduled to last, represented as a number of days or as hours, minutes, and seconds (hh:mm:ss). (To convert days to hh:mm:ss format, select the cells and choose Format > Number > Duration from the top menu bar.)

Note: You don’t have to use these exact names for your column headers. For instance, the “Column title” header could be called “Task” or “Project stage” if you prefer, and the items in this column will still be used as the card titles in timeline view. This makes it easier to apply timeline view to an existing spreadsheet.

3. Your spreadsheet can optionally contain additional columns, such as:

• Detail: A brief description of the task.
• Assignee: Who is responsible for completing the task.
• Status: How far along the task is. (This usually takes the form of a dropdown menu with options such as Not Started, In Progress, and Complete.)

Or you can start with a simple spreadsheet, then add more columns and data to it later on if you like.

How to create a timeline

Now that your spreadsheet is prepared, you can create a timeline for it.

Select the cells containing the data you want to show in the timeline. Or you can skip this step and have Google Sheets decide for you which rows and columns to use to generate a timeline.

On the toolbar above your spreadsheet, click Insert and on the menu that opens, select Timeline. A pane appears showing the data range you selected (or that Sheets suggested for you). You can adjust the range if you like, or just click OK.

Creating a timeline from spreadsheet data.

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A new tab that contains the timeline will be added to your spreadsheet. Each task has a card on the timeline showing its name on top and its start/end dates underneath.

Howard Wen / Foundry

On the toolbar above the timeline, Sheets offers several ways to adjust how you view the timeline:

• Time intervals: You can switch the view of the task cards to represent different intervals of time: Days, Weeks, Months, Quarters, Years, or Multiyear. Availability of these options depends on the dates of the tasks in your spreadsheet.
• View mode: You can select from Comfortable (the default) or Condensed, which tightens the layout of the cards with less space among them. Clicking Show cards in collapsed view will organize the cards of each card group along a single row. (We’ll discuss card grouping in a moment.) This view won’t be available if you have tasks with schedules that overlap one another.
• Text truncation: The next tiny button (a vertical line with a right-pointing arrow) controls what happens when the text for a task card is too long to fit on the card. Overflow lets the text flow off to the right. Clip cuts off the text at the right edge of the card.

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• Zoom: To zoom in and out of the timeline, click 100% on the toolbar. From the dropdown that opens, select the zoom percentage that you want.

How to edit your timeline

You can go back to your original spreadsheet tab and change the source data (such as tweaking the name of a task or changing its start date), and the timeline will be updated to reflect those changes.

You can also edit various aspects of the overall timeline view, such as which tasks are included and whether the cards display details beyond the task name and dates. These and other aspects are controlled through the Settings sidebar. To open it, click the Settings button toward the right of the toolbar over the timeline.

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The first four fields in the sidebar — “Select data range,” “Start date,” “End date or duration,” and “Card title” — control where the basic info that appears on the timeline cards is sourced from. Click inside any of these fields to change it.

Select data range: Click in this field and you can select a different range of cells for the timeline to pull from. For example, to show a subset of the project tasks in the timeline (say, the final three tasks), select only the rows for the tasks you want to include. Or, if you add more columns to a spreadsheet, you might need to adjust this field to include the expanded data set.

Start date and End date or duration: In these fields you select a column on your main spreadsheet tab for the timeline to pull data from. Say you want to see how changing the end dates for certain tasks will affect the overall timeline. In the main spreadsheet, you’d add another column with alternate end dates or duration times, and then go back to the timeline view and switch between the two columns using the dropdown in the “End date or duration” field.

Card title: This field lets you change which column the timeline pulls card names from. You likely won’t need to change this unless Sheets has misinterpreted which column you intended to use for card titles.

The remaining fields in the sidebar are optional but useful to know about.

Card color: If at least one of the columns in your spreadsheet has been set to a background color, you can select that column to change all the cards on the timeline to that color. (But it might be more useful to change the color of each card individually; more on that in a moment.)

Card detail: In this dropdown, you can select the column in which you filled out details for each task. The description for each task will then appear at top of its respective card (to the right of the task name) on the timeline.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Alternatively, you can select a different column to have its data shown on each task card instead. For instance, if you have an Assignee column, you could select that to display the name of the person responsible for completing each task.

Card group: Select a column in this dropdown, and the task cards on the timeline will be grouped by this column.

For example, if you select the Assignee column in your spreadsheet, then the names from that column will be shown along the left of the timeline. The cards for the tasks that are assigned to each person appear to the right of their name.

Howard Wen / Foundry

How to add a background color to a card

One last tweak you can make to your timeline is adding a different background color to each card, as shown in the screenshot at the top of this article page. Or you can devise a color-coding system, such as using a particular color for each assignee. Either way, it helps the cards stand out and makes the whole timeline easier to take in at a glance.

On the Settings side panel, go to the “Card color” field and select a column in your spreadsheet. (It doesn’t matter which one.)

Next, on the timeline, click the task card that you want to add a background color to. This opens the “Card details” sidebar to the right of the timeline. On it, click Edit card color settings.

Under “CARD COLOR,” click the dropdown. On the small panel that opens, select one of the eight preset colors, or click Customize if you want to select a specific color from a spectrum graph.

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Repeat these steps for each card in your timeline, giving each a different color.

Note: At the bottom of the “Card details” sidebar, clicking Edit data simply switches to the tab of the sheet with the source data for your timeline. The row that provides the source data for the card is highlighted, so that you can edit these cells.