Speaker 1: Hey, this is Dan Lehmann from AutomationHelpers.com and today we're going to talk about a new feature that Google has released called Google Timelines. Now Google's released this feature as part of their workspaces and I believe at this point it's only paid business workspaces that have availability of this feature. So if you're just on a free G Suite account, you're not going to be able to see this. This feature is rolled out as part of Google Sheets. When we create a sheet, we ultimately have data that's living still in a standard worksheet, but we have a new view to be able to view this data as a timeline. Let's take a look at some of the features here. We notice that right off the bat, we're able to group by our tasks or our cards. And in this case, we have it grouped by an owner. We've got different color coding abilities. Right up at the top, we've got some configuration settings to affect how this looks and feels. We have the ability to see a different view in terms of the amount of time. So we could have this over days or weeks. We could get out to quarters or even years. Now if you have an event far enough in the future and you've scrolled along your timeline, this will be enabled to let you automatically scroll back to today to be able to see what's relevant at this point in time. Similar to other Google products like Gmail, you've got the ability to display a density, comfortable or condensed, which just changes the amount of spacing that takes on the page. And we can also zoom in and out just for better visibility and readability. Now, we don't have too many settings up here. But we also have the ability to configure this how we want so it better aligns with the columns that we have in our spreadsheet. So I can take a look at our underlying data. And to be able to set this up, you need to create a spreadsheet, you can call it anything you want for that worksheet. And it recommends the types of columns that you might have, but you can title these anything you want. So right here, I have a card title, but I could call this task or task description, if I want, it doesn't matter, because we're going to get the ability to select which column we want this to map to. First of all, I'd recommend having a title for the task or the card, that's what's going to display most prominently on that card on the timeline view. I've created an owner column, because I find that that's helpful to have assigned ownership for this. Another feature that Google came out with recently was their smart chips that allow you to actually tag users as well, that could be an option you might want to utilize in conjunction. If you're collaborating with people on documents like this, you'll of course want a start date, because in a timeline, everything is going to be date based. So you will need that start date. But from here, you have two options in terms of if you want to have an end date and actually specify this, or if you want a duration in terms of the amount of time, in this case, I'm doing days, you can do either option, I'm just showing both of these because I have them as examples, but you won't want to have both when you're actually displaying it on the timeline. Now I've created a priority field, this isn't necessary by any means, but you do have the ability to color code. And we can apply the colors by using any kind of conditional formatting, I set up some rules based on what the text says to apply a certain color. But you can also individually color code the cards if you'd prefer. Now I've added another field for purpose, because you get the option to display another field at the top, which we'll show you in the timeline in a second. And then I also have some task info, so that when we click into the card, we have some additional context about what that task is about. Let's head back into the timeline. And from the timeline, we can see that we select the data range. Now that data range needs to encompass all of the fields that you want to have included inside the timeline or the data that we're pulling from. Now notice that we have a data error up here. This is because our range actually encompasses too many rows. Typically, I would do something and say, hey, from a one until h 1000, just to encompass additional tasks later on. But it specifically is throwing this error because we don't have a row and row eight. Now I haven't seen this cause any actual issues. So I'm choosing to ignore that. But if you see that error, that's what's it's being caused by. Now we have a start date here. And this is where we start to align our column. So in this case, I called start date start date, which is easy enough. But again, remember that the naming conventions can be exactly what you choose. So I've start date, this is where we would be able to let me change this to days, this is where we'd be able to say change to go by duration or end date. So I could go by the specific end dates that I have. Or I could say duration, we have an additional feature, if we go by duration to include or not include weekends. I really like this feature, because it's helpful. If we're looking at other project management software, this is a pretty standard feature. Because if we have a task, and we know it takes five days, but we're starting on Thursday, we don't want to include Saturday and Sunday, as we're typically not expecting that folks are going to work on those days. In addition to this, we can assign that card title, this can be called whatever you want. And we have optional fields here, this is where I'm selecting that color, because we have the conditional logic to set the color. And then we have purpose, which is our card detail. So you'll notice that sales services, HR, all of those are that purpose field, you get one additional field that you can display on the top level of that card. And then you have the ability to group by when this case, I grouped it by the owner that or the assignee that this is assigned to. Instead, you could group it by something else like priority, if we wanted to, this can be configurable based on what makes most sense for you. Now, once we have all of those options in place, we've got the ability to actually drill down into that card and open it up. This is where we can see the task info, which we don't see on the top level there, we'll be able to see the additional fields of information that we have as well. Now, the natural question that would come from this is, hey, can I drag and drop this around to be able to change things, change priorities, change the timeline. And this is where I'd like to see the functionality going in the future. As of right now, if you click on a card, and you click on Edit data, this is just going to take you to the corresponding record, which is helpful, more helpful, I'd say than just taking you to the spreadsheet, it'll actually highlight the correct row. But you have to make the changes in the spreadsheet UI as opposed to the timeline UI. In the future, I'd like to see some improvements there to let us actually drag and drop change dates on the canvas. At this point, we don't have any Gantt functionality, we don't have task dependencies or other common things that we'd see in more project management tool. But by and large, I think this is a really good start for Google, just having the ability to have a more visual view of data that we have in our spreadsheet is a huge improvement from where we've been, you don't have to use these third party templates. Now you can just do this as part of Google. Now to enable the timeline, you'll want to go into your spreadsheet, you can highlight your data. And you can go ahead and insert a timeline similar to how you would insert a chart. If you don't see this feature, it might not be currently enabled by your organization. Or it could be that it's not yet released to you. It's coming out in the next couple of weeks. So keep your eyes open for that. I'd be curious what you think about this feature. Is this something you could see your team utilizing? Let me know in the comments below.