Has your child ever needed to create a timeline for their homework? Microsoft Office 2010 has a really handy tool that can make great looking timelines. Check after the jump and we will show you how to create a Smart Art timeline.
Smart Art is a cool feature for quickly creating diagrams and infographics in MS Office documents by editing preset templates. There are a few Smart Art templates that lend themselves to creating timelines which we have found useful for illustrating homework projects that cover events happening over a period of time such as:
- Historical events: e.g. battles of WW2, the reigns of British monarchs, etc.
- The lives of famous writers for English Lit projects
- A timeline showing the steps to take in a biology experiment
If your child is a bit young for homework, you could still use a Smart Art timeline to make an unusual record of their life so far – showing key events like their birth, their first words, and so on.
Make playdate cards for your kids with Microsoft Office 2010
How to make a timeline
Start up PowerPoint and create a new, blank presentation and then click the Insert tab. Click the Smart Art icon to bring up the Smart Art browser. There are several different categories of Smart Art but the ones most useful to us here are in the Process category.
Choose your Smart Art and click OK to insert it on the page. You should see the ‘empty’ Smart Art on the page as well as a windows showing the text fields you can fill in.
Type your key facts (e.g. the dates and a short bit of text) into these fields and they will appear in order on the timeline. You can add new fields (and thus more boxes or timeline stages) by simply hitting ENTER.
Add pictures
You aren’t limited to just text on your timeline. You can paste pictures in to the boxes and any text you type will just be overlaid on them. Text can be formatted just like any other text in MS Office 2010 so you can select the font, colour and point size you think looks best.
Top tip – Smart Art will try to force you to type some text in and will use [TEXT] if you don’t type anything. If you just want to have a picture in a box with no text, just enter a space to trick Smart Art into doing your bidding.
Finish off
Once you have the basic timeline you can add background images, clip art, descriptive text and decorative shapes using the drawing toolbar.
The Kids Matter – The economics of fatherhood – #1 Health video was made using Microsft PowerPoint 2010