Does your work involve presenting and analyzing data on a time series?

For example, presenting financial information

Statistical data

Or drawing up project schedules,

Using a Gantt chart

Are you tired of building timelines manually in Excel?

You know what I mean:

Messing around with cell formatting, styles, borders, colors, text positioning for HOURS, and making 47 changes until your worksheet finally looks presentable?

It’s INSANE how much time we spend on such monkey work, given the essential role timelines play in our work and how often we have to create one.

As a Project Manager working for a large corporation, creating timelines was part of my daily work. I spent literally hours on this kind of stuff, partly because I’m a perfectionist and I would NEVER send out an Excel workbook that does not also LOOK NICE!

So, for a long time I just accepted the fact that this tedious process was the only way to build appealing timelines.

But then one day, loaded with work, I said to myself:

“This can’t be it. I’m wasting so much time in Excel building timelines. I’m gonna look for a tool that will automaticlly generate timelines for me”

So I looked for suitable tools.

But there weren’t a lot of options.

And the tools I found weren’t really convincing.

Some were buggy.

Or they didn’t provide enough flexibility regarding the timeline layout.

For example, I wanted to show weekdays in short form (Mon, Tue, Wed etc.) because this took less space within the cells and provide a better user experience.

But most tools didn’t give me any such options.

Long story short, most Excel tools were not suitable for a professional context.

And then:

I decided to build my own tool for quickly generating timelines in Excel

With Excel as the working environment, I thought the best approach would be to build an Excel based tool using VBA code to handle the timeline generation.

You don’t need to install any additional software.

Just launch Excel, run the macro and … voilà! …. your timeline is ready.

It took me a few days to build the tool and ensure it was working the way I wanted.

In particular, I wanted to make the tool flexible so you could churn out timelines in the exact format you needed.

And as we like to work in our own language, the tool also had to populate the dates and weekdays in your local format and your language instead of returning English descriptions only.

Finally, the tool is ready!

You can read more here: