Timelines in Law Practice

Robin — Fri, 08 Apr 2005 12:41:09 +0000

Are timelines used by attorneys?Would this be a useful feature to have in Notebook?

wrothnie commented

wrothnie — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 17:19:59 +0000

The short answer to this is "Yes". They can be a great visual aid to illustrate / explain the sequence of events.

Robin commented

Robin — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 19:09:49 +0000

Not being an attorney I did not know how useful a timeline feature would be. I was thinking if NoteBook had some type of a timeline feature it might be useful to someone other than myself. I know teachers use them, and I thought attorneys might use them as well. From time to time, I export information from NoteBook to import in a timeline program, but this requires some manipulation of the data before I can import it. An option to export data from NoteBook in a format that can be imported in a timeline program would be a help.

Jordan commented

Jordan — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 00:41:10 +0000

OT: Robin, what timeline program do you use? I'm looking for one, I like where Bee's Timeline is going but development is sloooowww.

Robin commented

Robin — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 14:47:48 +0000

Jordan,

I use TimeLiner 5.0 from Ton Snyder Productions. It does not have much of a Mac like interface, but it seems to work well.

http://www.tomsnyder.com/

I will have to look at Bee's timeline program. I don't remember there being many timeline programs for the Mac; Is Bee's timeliner fairly new?

Jordan commented

Jordan — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 20:41:05 +0000

Yes, Bee Doc's Timeline is very new, it's still Beta...They release the current stable version every couple of weeks. Here's the Version Tracker Link:

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/25450

I've been using it without any problems, but some of the features aren't functioning yet. I've "printed" to PDF and added the PDF file into Notebook, the charts look very nice.

At first I had a hard time figuring out how to import into the Timeline since there wasn't any documentation. It's actually very simple, it uses Tab Delimited Text, but the key is to format the text with the first row titled "Label", "Start Time", and "End Time". I haven't really tried Exporting from Notebook to the Bee Doc's Timeline, only the other direction, but it shouldn't be to hard to streamline using Excel, or a text editor. I mostly export from Filemaker to Timeline to Notebook via PDF. If Notebook would export to tab delimited text it could go straight into the timeline, but it doesn't yet.

-jordan

gdgrifflaw commented

gdgrifflaw — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 06:21:16 +0000

I am an attorney and would love to have a timeline feature in Notebook. Is this a possible addition?

judithblair commented

judithblair — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 08:43:52 +0000

i asked about timelines in Notebook a while ago. I'm a student beginning research on a thesis, and i wanted some way to make a nice historical timeline.

Anyway, when i asked, i was told that Notebook probably would never have this capability. Maybe if a bunch of lawyers got together to demand this feature, that would carry more weight than one lowly college student.

Robin commented

Robin — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 19:31:23 +0000

Jordan,

If Notebook would export to tab delimited text it would be a help, you still may need to diddle with the data a-bit in Excel to get the file as you need it.

In Notebook, I use a simple format where the date/time is the parent, and the event is the child. When Notebook exports a file in plain text, the child has 4 spaces for the indent. The file looks like the example below.

Untitled

Monday, September 20, 2004 8:29:32 AM
Received call from Billy Bob......
Monday, September 20, 2004 8:35:32 AM
Contacted driver, Clutch Cargo......

I open the file in TextEdit delete the title and use "Find" to find and replace the 4 space characters with a tab character. I save the file, and then I Import the file into Excel. The date/time (parent) is in the left column and the event (child) is in the right column but one row below the date/time (parent) data. I shift the event (child) column to match it's date/time data, delete the empty rows then save the file as plain text. The file looks like the example below.

Monday, September 20, 2004 8:29:32 AM Received call from Billy Bob......
Monday, September 20, 2004 8:35:32 AM Contacted driver, Clutch Cargo......

I then import the file into TimeLiner 5.0. With TimeLiner 5.0 the import file needs to be plain ASCII text, and the date and event need to be separated by a tab character and each line needs a hard return.

Jordan commented

Jordan — Sat, 30 Apr 2005 02:18:00 +0000

Robin,

I don't usually need to export out of Notebook into my timeline program, generally I import into Notebook, however since we started discussing it I got curious and played around with it.

This is what I found; You can insert a Tab Space by pressing Option and Tab at the same time. So... If each Notebook cell on the page maintains the same order with a Tab between each entry on the line, and each line is a Parent, and you then export as txt, this exports as essentially tab delimited. just delete the title and any extra lines. It works great with Bee's Timeline, but you MUST add as the first line: "Label Start Time End Time" even if you don't use each entry. So for me, it would look like this (I had to substitute (TAB) for a real tab space since the forum isn't showing it correctly):

Label(TAB)Start Time(TAB)End Time
Guttenburge invents printing press(TAB)1/1/1450
Full-color printing invented(TAB)1/1/1719
First pencils made(TAB)1/1/1795
Melvil Dewey invents vertical file system(TAB)1/1/1874
Typewritter invented(TAB)1/1/1874
Paper clip invented(TAB)1/1/1900
First ballpoint pen(TAB)1/1/1938
Desktop publishing(TAB)1/1/1984

I haven't tried Timeliner so I don't know if it works with that or not. I don't know if that would cut down on your manipulation time or not...

-jordan

Jordan commented

Jordan — Fri, 13 May 2005 01:38:26 +0000

BeeDoc's Timeline v1.0 has been released. The new help file explains how to import and export much better then I did in my last post. Here is the website:

http://beedocuments.com/timeline.html

-jordan

LiamH commented

LiamH — Mon, 14 May 2007 08:32:09 +0000

Robin,

I would say that the timeline/chronology is the bedrock of any litigator's work. When I am assembling a case the first thing that I do is prepare a chronology. It's something I was taught at Bar School as an essential to any practice.

I would welcome any form of timeline/chronology addon. I have bee documents timeline myself. It is a very nice piece of software. However, I find it does not like non-US date formats and is perhaps not suited to very intensive chronologies. For example I worked on a fraud case and needed to prepare a chronolgy to record daily events over a five year period; it was too much for timelime. I ended up just preparing a very long table in pages.

gdperks commented

gdperks — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 19:07:25 +0000

Check out TimeFlyer from http://www.asinglepixel.com.

That might suit your timeline needs better...

Prosecutor commented

Prosecutor — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 19:22:53 +0000

I'm pretty happy with TimeFlyer.

77miker commented

77miker — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 01:27:17 +0000

http://www.beedocs.com