Technology Timeline Tutorial

Hello class! Today I will be showing you how to create a timeline, using Microsoft excel. We will be using your notes from yesterday about the History of the Personal Computer, but this tool can be used for any subject. Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet program that can be used for many things. A Spreadsheet is sort of like a table, or chart, which has many boxes called “cells”. To organize all these cells, Excel uses letters for the Columns, and numbers for the rows. So if I want you to click on this box, I’ll say click on “A1”: A for the column, and 1 for the row. Let’s begin with your title. Click on cell D1. Type in the title of your timeline. Now click on cell B1 and drag your mouse all the way over to G1. We’re going to click the “Merge Cells” button, to make it all one big cell. Now let’s give it a border. Use the paint bucket to give it a background, we’ll make this one blue. And increase the size to size 16. Now let’s start on the timeline. Click on cell B4. Now you’re going to start typing in your dates, one date per cell. When you’ve typed in all your dates, click on B4 and drag your mouse over to H4, to select all the dates. We’ll use the alignment tool to center them. Then give them a border, use the paint bucket to give them a background (we’ll make this one green), and now we can move on to the details. Click on B3. Now above the dates, in each cell, we’re going to write just the name of the inventions. Now, at this point, you’re going to see that the words sort of overlap the cells, for now. Don’t worry! We’ll take care of this when we format the cells. For right now, if you want to make sure you’ve done it correctly, click on the cell and look above in the Formula Bar. You should see your entire sentence. If you don’t see your entire sentence in the Formula Bar, you may need to go back and redo them. Once you’ve typed in all the invention names, click on B3 and drag your mouse over to H3, so we can format all the invention names the same way. Give it a border again. Use the paint bucket to give it a background, we’ll make this one purple, and this time we’re going to click on the Orientation Button, which looks a little like a slanted “A” and “B”. Choose to angle the text counterclockwise, and now you should be able to see all of your text. Pretty neat huh? Go ahead and use the alignment tool to center them, and now we’ll move on to all of the details. In row 5, go ahead and type in each detail for the invention under each date. This part is very similar to what we just did, only this time we’re going to click on B5, drag your mouse over to H5, and first we’ll click the Wrap Text button, which is just above the Merge Cells button. Now we can see our writing a little bit clearer, but next we’ll go to the Orientation button again and this time rotate the text upward. Now we can center it using the alignment tool, give it a border, and give it a color background, let’s do orange. Now the last thing you need to do, is go up to the windows button, go to “Save As…”, and title it your first and last name separated by a period. (first.last). Click “Save”, and give yourself a big pat on the back for creating a very sophisticated yet simple timeline using Microsoft Excel.