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Common Problems in TimelineJS3
Note: The "Timeline creator" refers to this page where Timeline embed codes can be created: http://timeline.knightlab.com/#make
How do I ask for help about TimelineJS3?
Before opening a support ticket, please read through this page. Most of the questions we get are covered here. If you are still unable to solve the problem:
- Submit a request here: https://knightlab.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
- Please include the URL to your spreadsheet from your browser's address bar
- Please also include the pubhtml link that is available in the File > Publish to the web dialog
Note: Including both links is extremely helpful for diagnosing problems and will serve to expedite your request. Again, please review the common problems below; most Timeline questions are issues related to either spreadsheet access or data formatting.
ERROR: Unable to read your Google Spreadsheet. Make sure you have published it to the web. Timeline configuration has no events.
Timeline cannot access your spreadsheet.
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Be sure you have followed Step 2 in the Timeline creator: From your spreadsheet, go to File > Publish to the web and publish the entire spreadsheet. If published, there will be a purplish/blueish button-looking "Published" indicator in this dialog.
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If Timeline is still unable to access your spreadsheet, something else is blocking access. Most commonly, for GSuite or other corporate or organization accounts, this is a case of administrative access controls. If you have an organizational account, please take this issue to your account administrator.
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If you have tried the above and the problem persists, please send both spreadsheet links to KnightLab support (see Asking for Help above)
Timeline cannot find any events in your spreadsheet.
This is most commonly caused by blank rows in your spreadsheet. Timeline will stop looking for new data once it hits a blank row. A blank row, for example, at row 2 just below the header row will appear to Timeline as a spreadsheet with no events. Similarly, if row 2 is a title row and row 3 is blank, none of the subsequent events will be processed by Timeline.
Pro Tip: Advanced users might take advantage of a blank row by using this as a mechanism for including notes or rows not yet ready to publish. Such metadata can be separated from the published data with a blank row. Obviously use this trick with caution -- we do not recommend including any sensitive data in your spreadsheet; although hidden from Timeline, below-blank-row data is still publicly accessible.
If there is more to the error message, it is likely one of this issues above. If, however, this is the entire error message:
- Era rows only? Your Timeline must have actual events in it. If all of your rows are labeled as era rows, then you have no events.
Keep in mind: Timeline must be able to access your image via the internet. Furthermore, it must have permission to display it. These are actually different issues that manifest only slightly different symptoms. There Let's take each in turn.
This is the most common problem with images not displaying. The URL that you paste into the media field must be a direct link to the image. Here's a trick: copy and paste that URL directly into your browser's address bar. Is there a redirect that happens? Then it is not a direct link. Is the thing that loads only the image, or is the image inside of a viewer page? If it is not just the image, then this is not a direct link. Please paste a direct link into the media file. If the problem persists, please be sure to send us both spreadsheet links (see Asking for help above) when opening a request.
This is a bit trickier to suss out as it involves understanding "cross domain" issues on the internet. If you are able to open your image link directly in the browser and believe you have pasted a direct link to the image in your media field, it is possible that Timeline cannot load the image due to cross domain (CORS) permission issues. Please open a ticket and send both spreadsheet links (see Asking for help above) so we can take a look.
There is not direct support for running Timeline locally. TimelineJS is a web application, so to make this work you would need to run a localized web hosting environment, host the Timeline resources from there, and point your embed to the local resources.
Note that since Google Spreadsheets are necessarily web based, a full localization would require embedding the Timeline via Javascript and providing the data in JSON format rather than with a spreadsheet. Information about doing this is in the docs here: https://timeline.knightlab.com/docs/json-format.html
If your Timeline appears to be working in general (no errors are showing) but one or more event slides are missing from the Timeline: The most common cause of this is one or more blank rows in the spreadsheet. Timeline will stop reading events when it gets to a blank row. Check to be sure there are no blank rows either before your data rows or between data rows.