Order of events in Timeline

Q & A
#1

Hello!

I don’t like to do hours/minutes timelines, just day. Keeps life a little simpler for me. It’s enough for me to know, “this event comes before this event on this day.” On the timeline, however, and in relationship view, events that occur on the same day seem to be somewhat randomly sorted-- or, I should say, sorted according to logic that I haven’t figured out :wink:

Is there some way to FORCE the timeline to put one event before another, without assigning a precise time to the event, and without LINKING the events such that X event must always come before Y?

What I’m looking for is a kind of drag and drop order that will persist on the timeline.

Is this possible? Is it so obvious that I should already know how to do it?

Thank you!

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#2

Hi,
I’d be very happy to be corrected, but I’m pretty sure that this isn’t possible - tried to find the relevant forum thread but can’t see it.

I can sometimes work around this problem by using a filter to hide the inbetween events that I don’t want to see - splitscreen is useful - but if every event is relevant I agree that it does becomes a pain.

Sorry that wasn’t more helpful : )

#3

Oh, that’s too bad. :frowning:

If folks at Aeon are following the thread, I wonder if there might be a workaround, like a tick box that instructs same-time timeline events to appear in the order they are listed in the spreadsheet…?

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#4

Hang on!! I think I have discovered the solution, which works just perfectly for my purposes. If I open the spreadsheet view, and sort by NUMBER, I can I can then drag the events in the order that I want them, and they will appear in that order on the timeline. This is a true head slap-- of course that’s the way Aeon sorts events! By their numerical order in the timeline!

I had to somewhat painstakingly compare my outline and spreadsheet views, and make sure that I sorted events in both views so that they match (outline sorts by its own scene numbers, because events in the narrative are not always chronological, whereas events in the spreadsheet/timeline are ALWAYS chronological. But it’s just perfect, and exactly what I was looking for.

Bonus: (again, no doubt this is head-slappingly obvious to those who use Aeon more regularly) if I am sorting by # in spreadsheet, I can drag an event to the “order” I want it to appear, and its date will change to reflect the new position!

The more I use this tool the more I love it.

:slightly_smiling_face:

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#5

Hmmm… that doesn’t work for me :thinking:

When I drag and drop an event, it’s date changes to equal the start date of the one after it. I’m sorting by the # column. Is that how you’re doing it?

Are the events you’re moving on the same day? I’m working on historical timelines so it could be that moving an event from say 1745 to 1710 behaves differently to moving two events on the same day… maybe

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#6

Oh, you’re right! I had been most concerned with a cluster of events all occurring on the same date, which were showing up all scrambled, and I wanted to sort in a particular order. I see that if I drag an event that occurs on a different day or in a different year, it grabs both the day and year from the following event. That’s still okay for my purposes, since I rarely do that and it’s easy to make adjustments. What I most needed was a way to make a list of untimed events sort in the order I want, and this does work :slightly_smiling_face:

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#7

When you have the items sorted in Spreadsheet View via the # column, this is sorted in their Chronological order. It is this Chronological order that is used to determine the order of items in the Relationship View.

If an item has dates, then this will determine its position in the Chronological order.

However items without dates can still be in your Chronological order (eg. you know an event happens between event A and event B, but you don’t know the exact date yet). For these items, you can manually move where in the order you would like them to be.

This also means you can manually reorder items that have the exact same date. You can decide which of the items occurs “first”, even though they all occur at the same time.

You can also just reorder the items on Relationship View via drag and drop. This will have the same effect as in Spreadsheet View (eg. if reorder items with dates, then their dates will adjust if needed to keep them chronologically).

You can read more about Chronological Order here: Chronological vs Narrative Order - Aeon Timeline 3 Knowledge Base

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Ordering in Spreadsheet out of sync with Subway
#8

Thanks for the reply Jess.

… that’s the piece of info that was missing in my head : )

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#9

Thanks, I had the same problem and your solution worked for me. You need to be a bit careful where you “drop” the event in Spreadsheet view if you want it to re-order (drop between), rather than become a sub-event (if you drop on top).

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