Which SmartArt graphic layout would be used for a timeline?

This step-by-step PowerPoint timeline tutorial will show you how to make professional timelines right inside the popular presentation tool.

Microsoft PowerPoint enables users to create a basic timeline that they can manually adjust and restyle to fit their needs. The result is a simple graphic fit for presentations to clients or executives, but not quite flexible enough for those who need to show more accurate details or update the timeline regularly.

If you need to regularly create and update timeline slides for high-level presentations, a simple and fast solution would be to use a timeline maker for PowerPoint that automates the process. On this page, you will see both the manual and the automatic way to make a timeline in PowerPoint.

Which tutorial would you like to see?

If you prefer to manually build a PowerPoint timeline, you will need to use PowerPoint's SmartArt tools to create a basic visual and then adjust that graphic to make it look better for presentations. Here are the exact steps:

1. Create a new presentation or open an existing one and add a new blank slide.

   

2. Go to the Insert tab on the PowerPoint ribbon and click on the SmartArt button in the Illustrations section.

   

3. In the window that pops up, select the Process category, where you will find a variety of graphic options to choose from for your PowerPoint timeline. For a simple graphic that clearly shows the key events or milestones of a project, we’d recommend choosing the Basic Timeline.

   

   You can change the style at any time from the SmartArt Tools Design tab on the ribbon if you want to try out different layouts for your graphic.

2. Add your data.

The default graphic generated by PowerPoint will have placeholder text and only 3 milestones. You can insert your own data directly on the graphic by typing inside the [Text] boxes on the slide, but adding new milestones or events besides the 3 default ones can become a little tricky this way. That’s why we’d recommend using the Text Pane instead, as it’s faster and it allows you to easily add extra milestones to your PowerPoint timeline. Here’s how it works:

1. If the Text Pane is not already visible, click on the small icon right on the left of your timeline arrow to open it.

   

2. Here, type in your milestone dates and descriptions, and PowerPoint will automatically update the graphic. Press Shift + Enter to insert a line break and show the date and description of a milestone one below the other.

   

   Note: You’ll notice that PowerPoint places your milestones equidistant on the timeline, regardless of the relative distance between their dates. This is because the tool “reads” the dates you enter as plain text, so it can’t calculate the number of days between two milestones. You can manually drag milestones closer to or farther away from each other, but as you add more items on the timeline, the layout will get distorted. That’s why we’d recommend leaving them as they are.

3. To add more milestones to your PowerPoint timeline, simply press Enter after an existing item in the Text Pane and insert your data. You’ll notice that PowerPoint automatically shrinks the text size the more events you add to your timeline. To ensure your data remains easy to read, it would be safe to keep a maximum of 5 to 7 milestones.

   

   When building your PowerPoint timeline, you may be tempted to manually increase the size of the text for improved legibility. We would suggest avoiding that because it tends to ruin the whole layout. Instead, you can expand the size of the graphic box as we did above, and PowerPoint will automatically make the milestone descriptions larger too.

Now you can apply some styling choices if you want to make your PowerPoint timeline look more unique.

1. To customize the overall look of your timeline, you can change the SmartArt Styles and color palettes from the SmartArt Design tab on the ribbon. In our example, we chose a darker color scheme from the Change Colors dropdown and selected the Intense Effect option from the Styles menu to make the milestone circles stand out a bit better.

   

2. While the SmartArt functions apply to the whole graphic, you can also customize individual items to make a more unique PowerPoint timeline. To do this quickly, right-click on any item and use the formatting options that pop up to restyle it. For instance, you can use Shape Fill to make specific milestones stand out or change the dates’ Font Color to differentiate them better from the milestone descriptions.

   

3. Now, to make the milestones easier to follow, you can use drag & drop to slightly narrow the arrow shape and move the circles closer to their corresponding descriptions. It may take a while to find the ideal positioning, but it will help guide your audience’s eye when looking at your timeline in PowerPoint.

   

4. Finally, you can also play with the milestones’ sizes and shapes to get a more unique visual or draw attention to key data. To do so, select the objects you wish to customize and, using the options in the Format tab, you can resize them quickly or switch to other shapes.

   

   After testing more shapes and sizes using the Format tab, our timeline now looks like this:

   

   That’s it – these were the steps to manually making a timeline in PowerPoint. If you’d like to use the timeline created in this guide as a template to help you move faster, you can download the slide below, free of charge.

Download manual timeline slide

Manually creating and managing a timeline in PowerPoint is not only time-consuming but can also get quite frustrating if you want to make custom changes or updates to the visual.

In the steps below, we will show you how to quickly build, customize and update your graphic using Office Timeline, a lightweight PowerPoint timeline maker add-in that automates the whole process. To begin, you will need to install Office Timeline, which will add a new tab to the PowerPoint ribbon.

1. Open PowerPoint and insert your data into the Office Timeline wizard.

1. Inside PowerPoint, go to the Office Timeline tab, and then click on the New icon.

   

   This will open a gallery that provides a variety of styles and templates you can choose from for making a timeline in PowerPoint.

   

2. To select your preferred template or style from the gallery, double-click it and then click Use Template in the preview window to open the Data Entry Wizard. In this example, we will be using a custom PowerPoint timeline template we made earlier, which is available for download at the end of this tutorial.

   

3. Now enter your milestones and set their dates, or copy & paste an existing schedule from Excel to save time. You can also make a few quick styling choices here, such as changing the color or shape of each item. Once ready, click the green Create button.

   

1. Depending on the style or template you’ve selected, you will get a PowerPoint timeline that looks similar to this:

   

2. Once created, the timeline can be easily styled further or updated automatically using Office Timeline. For example, you can instantly change colors, shapes, and positions, switch the timescale from months to quarters, add tasks or swimlanes for a more complex visual, or adjust dates on the fly as your plans change.

FAQ about making timelines in PowerPoint

See how to make a PowerPoint timeline in under 60 seconds:

Alternatively, you can create beautiful PowerPoint timelines that you can quickly share straight from your browser with Office Timeline’s online timeline maker.

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