Office Timeline

What is Office Timeline Pro app?

Office Timeline Pro is a powerful tool for visualising project timelines. It is a general purpose tool rather than one explicitly built for education, but this does not make it any less relevant.

In schools, its features could be helpful for curriculum planning, school improvement plans, staff training organisation, etc. The organised and visual project management enabled by this app is not always one that school staff are comfortable using, but its commonality in commercial sectors shows that it has efficiency and clarity benefits.

Office Timeline Pro communicates project timelines in a clear visual format that you can integrate easily into other files. As projects react to real-world challenges, it is easy to update tasks and durations.

A subscription to Office Timeline Pro gives you access to the PowerPoint add-in and an online tool. Windows users can access both, while Macs must use the web-based version.

An executable file installs the add-in for PowerPoint installed on a Windows PC. You can download this without registering for the app and use the basic version. If you decide to use the premium version, you will receive a code that you can use to unlock the add-in from within PowerPoint.

What we love about Office Timeline Pro app.

While there are timeline makers available in other packages or online, having one built into PowerPoint makes sense. Many teachers and students are already familiar with using PowerPoint, so they start from a baseline of understanding when they adopt Office Timeline Pro.

Office Timeline Pro's intuitive approach makes it an excellent tool to assist you immediately when you begin planning timescales. After a bit of familiarity, you won't need to start your planning with pen and paper but get straight into defining tasks, roles, and timelines, making it a time saver.

You won't ever feel that you are locking your plans into a rigid structure when you use this app, as you can so easily update its data. Set out your initial goals and update them as other team members respond or you consider different aspects of the project.

The add-in integrates perfectly with PowerPoint and feels like a native part of the software. It follows similar user conventions to the main app but adds distinct functionality that would be difficult, time-consuming, or inflexible to complete without Office Timeline Pro.

What skills does it teach?

Office Timeline Pro is a PowerPoint add-in that makes it easier to produce timelines to incorporate into presentations. These timelines will be tools used to support teaching and learning rather than specific skills.

Teachers could use them to plan and organise their planning over the school year, coordinate staff tasks, produce study plans for students and illustrate lessons covering a historical period.

Using this add-in naturally leads to adopting effective time and planning strategies. As your competence and utilisation of this app improve, so will your knowledge of effective ways to visualise a project's lifespan.

What age is it appropriate for?

Teachers will probably be the main users of Office Timeline Pro, but if schools have access to it, there is no reason not to extend its availability to the whole school community.

For teachers who associate timelines with history, you could use this app to create interesting and detailed timelines of historical periods, but this isn't the app's primary purpose. In its case, timelines are mostly part of project management rather than lesson resources.

However, to prove the app's flexibility, a historical timeline template is included to show you how you can overlay events and themes to show cause and effect during historical periods.

Office Timeline Pro adds functionality to PowerPoint while staying within the conventions of the main app. This integration makes it usable by anyone who can work confidently with PowerPoint and understand the timeline visualisations offered by Office Timeline Pro.

Is Office Timeline Pro app easy to use?

PowerPoint is a mature app that has benefitted from decades of refinement. Office Timeline Pro fits in seamlessly with the main app making it easy for confident PowerPoint users to create and incorporate timelines into their presentations, whether for teaching or school administration.

The installation process for Office Timeline Pro was quick and easy. Once the executable file had completed downloading, a double click began the installation process. You should have PowerPoint already installed when you do this, as it is a requirement for the add-in to work.

The installation does not require any technical expertise and when completed, tapping on 'Done' opens up PowerPoint with an introduction to Office Timeline Pro.

This onboarding is excellent, as you will see a few screens showing you the key features of this add-in before finally arriving at an example deck. This presentation contains a series of timelines you can begin to edit and adjust to learn more about what this add-in can do. They take you through becoming familiar with the add-in to specific features and uses of the timeline creation features.

A handy feature is the inclusion of instructional video links in the add-in panel on the right of the screen. The first one you'll see is a short explainer about swimlanes which helps you understand the structure of a timeline.

Office Timeline Pro's dedicated tab, selected from the ribbon at the top of the screen, has an easy-to-find option for further help and support in text and video formats.

How will students benefit?

Project management skills are in demand in industry, and there is no reason that teachers cannot help kids begin to learn the basics of efficient planning. Once teachers have become familiar with using Office Timeline Pro for their purposes, they could introduce it to their students for group projects, revision planning, and anything else that rewards effective time management and planning.

How will teachers benefit?

Learning to use Office Timeline brings with it additional insight into project management. The features and approaches used by Office Timeline Pro reflect good planning practices, which will help teachers develop new professional skills and improve efficiency.

When school management produces timelines using this add-in, they can easily keep it updated and push the most recent copies to relevant parties so that everybody works toward the same goals and deadlines. It integrates effectively with other software, such as Excel, to make the process seamless.

As a highly visual tool and one that is very attractive, it will lead to school documents that help inspectors understand the plans in place and add a sheen of professionalism to projects and plans.

We mentioned the history timelines possible in the app earlier in this review, but it is worth emphasising how good a historical timeline can be when made with Office Timeline Pro. Rather than finding resources to match their plans, history teachers can use this add-in to create their own.

What can Office Timeline Pro app improve on?

Educational institutions are different working environments compared to other sectors.

While employees in many industries will have built up a familiarity with project management terms and concepts as they contribute to their delivery, this is much less likely to be the case with teachers who will spend the majority of their time involved in teaching and learning.

The jump from teaching to management in schools can be a large one. Teachers might not know the techniques, tools, and jargon needed to be most effective. In part, the lack of exposure to organisational approaches typical in industry is why many schools use less than efficient ad-hoc alternatives.

Office Timeline Pro has much to offer teachers in this position, but it could do more to clarify its benefits to those for whom swimlanes, Gantt charts, and even the idea of a visual timeline are unfamiliar concepts.

All of the information is on Office Timeline Pro's website and some time spent reading it will be very informative, but time is not always something teachers have to spare. An ideal solution would be an example or case study of Office Timeline Pro being used in a school for a common task.

Such information, with a comprehensive glossary of relevant terms, would provide a frame of reference to understand what this PowerPoint add-in could offer to school managers and provide staff with the impetus to learn and use it.

Separately to the above, the initial deck that the add-in offers is hugely beneficial as an introduction, and it would be great if there were a direct option to reopen it in future sessions. If this was part of the help menu, new users could start learning and experimenting quickly in each session.

How much does Office Timeline Pro app cost?

A free download of Office Timeline Pro allows you to try its features and see how easy to use it is. There are three subscription tiers available: basic, pro, and pro+.

There are various features enabled as you go up through the plans, but, on the whole, they open up import and export options and provide extra swimlane functionality.

A premium subscription gives you access to all the tools and options for a year. There are various ways of obtaining a suitable license for schools or anyone else who wants a multi-user subscription to Office Timeline Pro. The publisher provides details on the pricing page of their website.

For further reassurance, there is a 30-day money-back guarantee provided by Office Timeline Pro's publisher.

Is Office Timeline Pro app safe to use?

Office Timeline Pro's target users are not kids, but it does not contain anything that would be inappropriate. This add-in's primary purpose is for you to create your content, so the only content it contains, apart from its toolset, is support, example timelines and templates to help you learn to create timelines.

Office Timeline Pro did not appear to impact anything else in PowerPoint, which worked just as it did before installing the add-in. The Office Timeline Pro content is contained in a single additional tab. When you do not need this add-in's features, you can use PowerPoint as you have always done.

The free version of the add-in displayed no advertisements or pop-ups before a premium tier was activated for the rest of the review.

Overall rating of the app.

Office Timeline Pro gives a familiar and useful tool a new dimension. Equipped with this add-in, PowerPoint feels like a new tool you already know how to use.

You might have developed your own ad-hoc or unstructured time management and planning techniques, but try using this add-in to see how much clearer, quicker, and more flexible your time visualisation can be.

The free tier will give you a clear idea of what the add-in can do, and you'll learn new planning techniques. Timeline visualisation might not have been something you've thought about before, but Office Timeline Pro is a five-star app that could convince you to look closer at its benefits.