Any good tools for creating timelines?

Question

I need to create a historical timeline starting from 1600's to the present day. I also need to have some way of showing events on the timeline so that they do not appear cluttered when many events are close together.

I have tried using Visio 2007 as well as Excel 2007 Radar Charts, but I could not get the results I wanted. the timeline templates in Visio are not great and using Radar charts in Excel leads to cluttered data.

Are there any other tools or techniques I could use to create these?

@Darren:
The first link looks great. Thanks! The second link did not work in Firefox and was rendered as ASCII. It opened up fine in IE.
And yes, this is for the end users. So I want it to look as presentable as possible, if you know what I mean.
Thanks again!

Answer 1

SIMILIE Timeline would probably suit your needs. http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/

Timeline .NET: http://www.codeplex.com/timelinenet

Oh, i guess i should ask... for personal use or for display to end users? that might change what i would suggest, but this could work for internal purposes too i suppose.

Answer 2

Lifehacker has a good overview and tutorial of SIMILIE Timeline. They seem to like it quite a bit.

Answer 3

If you need a timeline from RSS Feeeds give xTimeline a try. I just used it

http://lifehacker.com/software/rss/create-a-timeline-from-rss-feeds-with-xtimeline-283098.php

Answer 4

@Pascal this page? http://tools.mscorlib.com/timeline/Default.aspx. If it's looking like ascii maybe look for a js error, but that renders on my system fine. If all else fails, it's a decent js library by the MIT team as it is, so you could wire up your own implementation

Answer 5

I also recommend Simile Timeline... I just implemented a webpage that uses it and JQuery and produces fantastic results. The downside is that you need to implement it through some html page, hook it up with the js and create some xml files, so it probably won't do for a presentational tool.

http://infosthetics.com/ is a good data visualization blog, maybe you find something there. Also check flowingdata.com

For webbased timelines, there is also:

circavie: http://flowingdata.com/2007/10/25/create-share-and-embed-custom-timelines-with-circavie/

dipity (looks killer): http://flowingdata.com/2008/08/18/tell-stories-with-interactive-timelines-from-dipity/