Appearance Settings - Scale

You can customize the look and behavior of your timelines in a variety of ways using the Appearance button above your timeline.

Clicking on Appearance will bring up an interactive dialog where you can preview one or more changes made to your timeline's appearance. Click Save Changes to close the dialog and apply your desired changes or click Cancel to close the dialog with no saved changed. 

Here's an overview of the Scale settings and their impact on your timeline:

Units

By default Preceden will automatically figure out the best scale to use to display your timeline based on its content. If you'd like to manually set the scale (because, for example, Preceden thinks  weeks is best but you want months) then you can set the scale here.

Note that Preceden won't always be able to display your timeline at every scale. For example, a timeline that spans years won't be able to be displayed with the scale set to   days because it would result in hundreds of axes. When this happens Preceden will display a notice on your timeline and give you an option to change the scale back to automatic. Learn more about resolving scale issues.

One other tip: sometimes the axes might extend far into the future. For example, your last event might take place in 2020, but your timeline shows dates across the top going out to the 2060s. The reason for this is likely because you have some events with long names and Preceden has to extend the dates to make sure those names are completely displayed. To address this, you can simply shorten the names of the events which will make it so Preceden needs less room to display them.

Date Range

By default Preceden will automatically adjust the dates on the timeline so that all of the timeline's events are visible on the timeline. If you'd like to zoom in to a portion of the timeline or have the dates be relative to today's date, these settings let you do just that. Learn more about zooming.