Visualizing your team’s data as a timeline can be the perfect way to understand project deadlines, OOO schedules, and more, all at a glance. To make it as easy and impactful as possible, we’re making a few changes to how timelines can be displayed and interacted with:
Better zoom-level controls, so you can set your timeline view to be anywhere from a single day to multiple years.
You can quickly navigate to the current day or a certain task with the “Today” and “Jump to” buttons.
Headers now stay in place while you scroll, so you never lose your place.
Clicking and dragging to resize and reposition items in your timeline is smoother
We’re excited to hear your continued feedback and see how these updates elevate how you visualize and navigate your data. We’ll be building off these foundational improvements to enable additional possibilities with timelines in the coming months—stay tuned!
This is such a great improvement. Well done! I did notice one thing that may be a bug. The bar that spans two dates ends in the column before the last date. Shouldn’t the bar span all dates?
Overall, I think this is a great improvement! When it rolled out yesterday on my system, I did notice a bug related to overflow of text. For some reason the text in my row label does not overflow uniformly across all items.
The display text is a concatenation based on a related record. Only certain versions of the concatenation overflow.
I have reported the bug and included a screenshot of the new behavior. I suspect it has something to do with my text formatting, though the only records that aren’t overflowing are the ones that do not have any special formatting.
THANK YOU so much for this. This is the timeline update I’ve been waiting for.
Would you consider giving us the options to choose which field is showing for the task on the left hand side? It defaults to the Display Column, and here we have that column concatenate to show all main record info. Would love to be able to select a more simplified field especially since some of the words are redundant from our timeline groupings.
This update is certainly a move in the right direction and fixes a lot of problems that made the older timeline basically unusable.
What I wish we also have is the ability to choose a column other than the Display Column for either of the left hand side or for the labels inside the timeline itself. Ideally, we can choose each of these columns separately.
The Display Column in most of our table is usually some formula that produces text optimized for searching Relation (fka Lookup) select boxes. It is almost always not what we want to display in the timeline.
Thanks! In a nice piece of synchronicity I had literally just created a proper Timeline implementation for the first time two days ago and the navigation / display changes are a really noticeable improvement.
However, I have a UI query: I’m using the Timeline to represent subtasks (when expanded) and their associated projects (when folded). While I’ve managed to conditionally colour-code the subtask by “assignees”, I’m struggling to do the same for the Related Projects based on different “owners”.
For clarity: this timeline is a view of the Subtasks table, which has Related Project (lookup / relation) column grouped along the left. Colouring subtasks by assignees is simple. But I’ve been trying to colour-code the Related Project (the folded state) based on the “Owner” in the Related Projects lookup.
The result when applying the Project Owner conditional format to any column except “Tasks” leaves the folded state white, and applying the format to Tasks column overrides the colouring of all the tasks in the unfolded state - which loses the distinction between project owner and task assignee.
This has been a great update that was much needed.
A couple of queries about functionality.
It seems there is still not any way to link tasks as predecessor/successor in the timeline view? I.e. you need to create this in the layout view and then install some smart filtering to present relevant options (for large tables). Surely this is obvious functionality you will be including soon?
In timeline views especially, the very limited options for sorting of groups becomes very frustrating, will there be an update to group sorting to be by any table in the group’s source table like it is for regular sorting?
This. I have the same problem, it’s caused because when we use only the date, the time is set to 00:00, so it’s like that task finished at midnight. The timeline view reveals that.
It would be more expected to consider we are counting the full day when time is not being used.
Here is what I did for that. I have a End Date (“Fin” in french)
And i Created a End Display Using DateTime() functio and set it to 11:59 PM, and used it in the time line
Merci, Quentin! This works great and solves the problem. Would be nice if Coda had a checkbox to pick the beginning or end of the day to avoid having the have an additional column/calculation.
Good update but until we have the concept of ‘milestones’ (tasks with 0 duration) that display differently to tasks as well as project baselining, and proper % complete formatting this is still unworkable for me and my clients. Note - I am a professionally certified PM, and used to teach project management software.
I’m also really waiting for the improvement mentionned in your post.
I’m personnaly “waiting” while using Rectangle() function with conditionnal formating, to create something like that. Not possible to display dependencies, but according to my use case I use either coda timeline or this one :
Every upgrade is appreciated. However, after a good dozen of hours of testing, these upgrades did little to convince me that timelines in Coda is actually practical way to do work. The headline was exciting, but I am disappointed. My hope is that this upgrade is just the first one a series of more considerable upgrades to timelines
@Stefan_Stoyanov Thanks for the feedback! Sorry to hear timelines aren’t currently meeting your needs. Would love to hear more about specific areas where the timelines aren’t measuring up and a bit more about the scenarios you are hoping to accomplish.
combination of data visualised (e.g. bars visualise duration of a task, while also having dots visualising the sub-tasks of the task) - IMHO, this is very important to have a real powerful useful timeline
connecting tasks and changing dependencies directly in the chart
visualisation of the day transition considering a start hour and end hour in a month and week views
cards layout in the timeline
customisable hover-over tooltips
0 duration tasks
bottom “footer” visually summarising the elements with icons representation (different icons by type of data)
One of the best presentation on how modern looking timeline should look like to be useful is created by www.chronoflotimeline.com Whole other level of boring 90s look timelines. Coda style would be this particular one which is powerful enough to be useful.
I did the same, and the main issue is that Timeline lost the interaction, we can’t drag the bars anymore since we put a formula in the End date(Fin).
@Sam_Harper , it would be great if you could address this issue. Dragging Timeline bars need to be interpreted as a full day. It doesn’t make sense to set a date like 23 July (example below), but the table shows it as 24 (because it’s considering 00:00h). My dates in this example should be 20 to 23. The days count is correct.
This small issue broke the Timeline interaction so my team just asked me to remove it, and they are now using only the table directly.
