Introduction to project timelines

You can use a project timeline to display a visual summary of a project. Timelines give you an easy way of reporting the progress of a project at a high level to stakeholders who do not want - or need - to view detailed information about a project.

You choose which tasks and milestones to add to the timeline. Adding those tasks and milestones that give a good overall picture of the project - for example, key summary tasks and milestones - can be a good approach.

In the following illustration, a project timeline displays the four key phases of a project, together with key milestones; the tasks - which represent top-level summary tasks within the project - have been colour-coded to make the timeline easier to read:

An example project timeline

By default, the project timeline covers the entire date range of the project, but you can specify a custom date range. This is useful if you want to create a timeline that depicts a particular time period within a project - the next few weeks or months, for example.

The timeline has a 'scroll area' - an area bordered by a coloured box - that indicates the time period that is shown in the currently active view. You can click and drag this scroll area left and right in the timeline to adjust the scope of the active view.

If you need to view more detail about a task in the timeline, you can 'go to' the task in the bar chart. This can be useful if you need to see where a task appears in the project itself, and if you want to see more detail of a particular task. For example, if you have added a summary task to the timeline, locating it in the bar chart will allow you to drill down into the summary group and view details of the tasks contained within it.

You may want to share the project timeline with others - for example, you may want to incorporate it into a Word document or a Powerpoint presentation, or to email it to someone. There are two ways of sharing a project timeline: you can export it to the Windows Clipboard, from where you can paste it into another application, and you can print it.