Impressive timelines

When you think about it, it’s pretty amazing that you can actually obtain graphically sophisticated timeline software like this for free. And, as long as you’re happy with the basic features (which are pretty impressive), it looks like you never need to pay. My feeling is that, if you’re going to use timelines a lot, it is well worth unlocking the paid features to allow export to a Keynote or PowerPoint slideshow or to a website.

A few things prevent me from giving this a 5-star rating as it stands:

1. A few bugs. For example, on exiting from a presentation, Timeline often rewrites the date of the most recent event with that of the oldest one. As long as you’re alert, you can put it right immediately, but it is rather a strange bug that could cause some people some problems. In addition, I find that Timeline sometimes removes notes and tags from one event and puts them in the next one. Again, rather a perplexing bug that could cause a lot of confusion if the problem isn’t noticed right away.
2. Color codes seem to be ignored in some of the provided themes.
3. Text and themes are only minimally editable. It appears to be impossible to make selected text bold or italic, for instance, and you can’t decide, for example, that you want event titles extra-large.
4. There is a tags field in each event, but it doesn’t seem to have any function. There is no autocompletion and no way to bring up a list of previously-used tags. You cannot click on a tag to show all the events that have that tag. Tags don’t show up during timeline presentations. It is to be hoped that the tags field has been introduced initially and will be followed up by ways to leverage the tags.

Kumarick about Timeline 3D, v5.0.3