Preceden Makes Timelines

Timelines are great tools for genealogists, historians, and others. You can create multi-color timelines to show events in an ancestor's life, events in a family over several generations, or the historical events of the day during your ancestor's life. When trying to reconstruct families, you can see major events of the individuals involved, plotted in such a way that you can easily see when relationships were possible. Timelines are also used often in histories, business planning, resumes, wedding planning, employee shift scheduling, employee vacation planning, lesson planning, and many more applications.

Now a free online tool makes great-looking timelines. There is no software to install and configure. Just go online and build the timelines you want. You can then save them, store them, keep them private, or give access to others.

Preceden is a free web 2.0 timeline visualization tool that lets you you make simple, powerful timelines for just about anything. The application is super simple to use. The displays of timelines are simple and yet effective. You can zoom in to seconds or out to billions of years.

When you create a timeline it is private by default, meaning that only you can see it. If you'd like to change this, you can click "change" link above the top right side of your timeline. You have three options:

• Only Me - No one except you can see the timeline.
• Everyone - Everyone can see the timeline.
• Restricted - This lets you control who can see the timeline. Simply specify a password and then give it to whoever you want to give access. When they go to your timeline page (you'll also need to give them the address), they'll be prompted for the password you gave them. This will let them see the timeline.

Preceden creates visual timelines only. That is, the timelines are only meant to be viewed on a screen. You can probably use screen captures to capture the timelines and then print them, but that is not a design goal of the site. Preceden focuses only on screen displays.

Did I mention that Preceden is available free of charge?

Preceden may be found at http://www.preceden.com

You can see examples of timelines created by others at http://www.preceden.com/examples and an even longer list at http://www.preceden.com/timelines. Hold your mouse over some of the timeline entries to see the pop-up details of each entry.