Overview
Using Office Timeline’s Import feature, you can easily split your Excel plan across multiple PowerPoint timeline slides. This can be useful when your data is too complex to fit on a single slide or when you wish to showcase some of your project’s phases on separate (focused) timelines. Here’s how it works:
Steps
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Import your project’s data from Excel into PowerPoint using Office Timeline.
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Style the resulting timeline as you wish (we’ll call this one the High-Level timeline), and then duplicate the whole slide. Simply right-click its thumbnail on the left side of the screen and choose “Duplicate Slide”:
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The duplicate slide created will become one of your “Focused” timelines. Here you’ll keep the first set of data you want to showcase out of all your tasks and milestones. With this new slide selected, go to Edit Data on the Office Timeline ribbon.
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From the Edit Data window, delete all items you don’t want to display on your first Focused timeline. In our example, we’ll keep just the “Plan” swimlane and a few timescale milestones.
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When done, go to your High-level slide again, duplicate it, and remove all unneeded items from the duplicate to create your second Focused timeline. Repeat until you’re done splitting your Excel data across multiple slides. This is what our plan looks like divided into several visuals:
Quick tip:
Since your Focused timelines started out as duplicates of the High-Level slide imported from Excel, you now have a big advantage: the slides are all linked to your .xls file. This means you can instantly update them when your Excel data changes. For each of your slides, just click Refresh Data on the Office Timeline ribbon and follow the simple Refresh steps update them effortlessly.
