This timeline shows the events that took place during a criminal activity and the people who were involved. It was automatically drawn in RFFlow from the data. There are three styles of timelines that can be automatically drawn in RFFlow. The above timeline is the Criminal Analysis Timeline style. That style has the people or entities involved on the left in circles. The events are in white rectangles on top of gray bars that have a date and time at the top. Lines and arrows go from the people in circles to each event that they took part in. The other two timeline styles are the Rectangle and Line Timeline and the Bar Chart Timeline. We chose to not number the events. RFFlow provides a large number of options you can use to customize your timeline. Once the timeline is drawn, you can then edit it like any other RFFlow diagram. This allows you to move shapes, edit text, change colors, etc.

First download the free trial version of RFFlow. It will allow you to open any timeline or chart and make modifications.

Once RFFlow is installed, you can open the above timeline in RFFlow by clicking on timeline_criminal_analysis.flo. From there you can zoom in, edit, and print this sample timeline. It is often easier to modify an existing timeline than to draw it from scratch.

To generate this timeline from the data, download the text file timeline_criminal_analysis.txt Then run RFFlow and click Tools, Auto Charts, and Draw Timeline. Follow the instructions to open the text file and generate the timeline.

To edit the data, run RFFlow and click Tools, Auto Charts, and Enter Timeline Data. Then open the text file.

To draw timelines from scratch without downloading or generating the timeline from data, run RFFlow and click on the More Shapes button. Scroll to the Criminal Analysis folder and click the plus sign to open it. Click the Event Flow and Timeline stencil and click the Add Stencil button.

To learn how to automatically generate a timeline in RFFlow, see:
How to Draw a Timeline