Charting horizonal timelines of historic people

[BryTack]

Hi All,

My excel is not  up to this and I would be very grateful for any help or suggestions.

I have a table of containing birth  and death dates of historical figures. E.g.

Isaac	Newton	4 January 1643	31 March 1727
William	Gilbert	24 May 1544	30 November 1603
Galileo	Galilei	15 February 1564	8 January 1642

Because dates cannot be before 1900, I've extracted years and calculate a death age

Isaac	Newton	4 January 1643	31 March 1727	1643	1727	84
William	Gilbert	24 May 1544	30 November 1603	1544	1603	59
Galileo	Galilei	15 February 1564	8 January 1642	1564	1642	78

But now I want to plot such data on something like a horizontal bar chart (stacked?). With the x-axis being the year (say 1500 to, eventually about 1800). Each person should have their own line, starting at the year of their birth, ending year of their death.   Something like a Gantt chart,  each line being a person.

Any help, in simple terms, very gratefully received.

Bryan

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@BryTack You'd have to play around a bit with separate series in a stacked bar chart. Perhaps something like in the attached file.

[#3]

Hi Riny, first, a very big thank you for your reply. For me the 'big step' you introduced was having a baseline figure (1500) and then relative values against that - as opposed to the absolute values I was using. Yes, can see a way forward now. Again thank you.

If this does not sound ungrateful, and if site administrators allow, for those the find this post in the future and doing similar things, likely to abandon this approach in favour of a piece of software called Aeon Timeline. Still evaluating but seems to have every I need and lots more.
Regards
Bryan