A timeline is an interactive pivot table filter that allows us to quickly filter our data by a date range. This is super handy for quickly summarizing sales data - check out the gif above for an example. We’ve got a pivot table summarizing our sales by region, and our boss constantly asks us to send them analysis for specific time periods. Rather than use a data filter each time, we can insert a timeline.
To insert our timeline, we’ll select any cell on our pivot table, and press ALT N S T (or, we could navigate to the Insert tab and select the Timeline command under the Filter group). Now we just need to select the date field that we’d like to filter by, so let’s select “date,” and then hit OK to insert the timeline.
Now we have an interactive timeline that allows us to zoom in and out of specific time periods!! We can select individual months, quarters, years, days - the opportunities are endless! Safe to say we’ll impress the boss with this one.
Quick note: timelines will only work with pivot tables and charts, so you’ll need to format your data source in one of these ways to insert a timeline.
