In Excel it’s easy to do, columns can give you 10 yearly lines running vertically, this allows for the positioning of information text boxes,in their appropriate position within a timeline making links or possible connections easier to see. The information you want to display can be entered into text boxes and these textboxes can be filled with a background colour to indicate a country e.g..

Once the text boxes are positioned in their correct place on the worksheet, the arrow feature can be usedwith the text boxes. I have built up many large files using this method, and find that this works and displays well for what I need. Below is a step by step procedure.

1.In Excel . Create a textbox-- Insert -Texbox

2.Right click Format shape here you can adjust the box margins, line colour and line size etc.and can easily be moved about a page.

3.Once you have made one box copy and paste to easily create as many textboxes as you need.each can be adjusted as required.

4. Your data can be entered into the boxes and position onto a sheet.or resized. I use Calibri font 10 and find it best for web pages and for displaying on smart phones etc.

5.go to Insert - Shapes at the top are arrows and lines these can be adjusted to whatever size etc to you like. and these can be copied and paste as many as you required, change colour etc. by right clicking the text box you can select bring to front which will hide part of line or arrow.

6. Download a free program called Paint.net when the chart is complete select the required area, right click mouse in Excel and copy, then paste into Paint.net. This program can handle very large Excel worksheet files. Also you can add photos into excel and move them about to where you need them to be placed in the chart,

7.Save the chart out as a Gif File, this is the best format for HTML pages, and a better choice in regards to bringing up a web page quickly due to the picture size, Paint.net can handle very large family trees etc. and these will display correctly on computers, Android devices etc.

Many genealogy programs just store the information, when you want to display it you will find that these programs are not flexible enough and do not look great. Within the Excel workbook file worksheets can be created to store all of your various bits of information, and allow the sorting of various types of gathered info very easy and updated when required.

The only real problem I had was printing out the larger trees, simply because of the size of the files, if needed a large file it can be split into sections and pasted into Paint.net, then saved out as a gif file. On my website the Ireland tree is huge and I split it into 7 sections and each section a separate gif file then saved out as a HTML file. It works and works well. The same can be done with data files etc.

I hope this gives some idea of how to create these files, it takes is a little practice but they are flexible and you can create good looking web pages and display your material in a pleasing way or just to produce a family tree chart with all your family information on it.and these pages are easily updated when required.