How To Organize People Into Groups

The most effective way to organise people into groups is to create parent item types which act as indicators of groups for different items in your timeline. 

Grouping People in a Novel

The first step to grouping items is creating parent items. For example, if you are writing a story, you may group people/characters in your timeline into categories like ‘Heroes’, ‘Villains’, ‘Antiheroes’ and ‘Civilians’. 

Some templates, like the Novel fiction template, include parent item types for the purpose of grouping as part of their design. To create add parent items with existing parent item, types follow these steps:

1. Click the + icon in the Sidebar and choose to add a new ‘Character Group.’ 
2. Do this for each character group you wish to create and name the items accordingly.
3. Hold and drag existing characters into your new character groups. 

Viewing Groups 

Once you’ve allocated the characters in your timeline to a particular character group, you can use Aeon Timeline’s grouping function to view and compare the timelines of different character groups. 

When using the Novel template, you can view a particular group using Timeline View by following these steps:

1. In Timeline View, go to the footer and click on the  icon. 
2. A popover menu will then appear with the heading ‘Group items in timeline.’
3. Here, tick the checkbox for Character Groups.
4. All the character groups you have created will now be visible in your Timeline View. Events associate with characters within each character group will then appear in your timeline view. 

Grouping People in Other Templates

If you are using Aeon Timeline for Project Management, you may create ‘Person’’ items for each individual member of the team. You may then create ‘Department’ items. ‘Department’ items will then act as Parent item types to ‘Person’ items. 

If the template you are using does not include pre-made groups, you can choose which item types can be parents of other types in the advanced item type settings.