Hiding the Today indicator from the Project 2010 Timeline
By blurg64
Over the past few months I have found myself using the new Timeline feature of Project 2010 more and more to communicate project schedule information to audiences that may not be comfortable reading Gantt charts. By default, the timeline will show a ‘Today’ indicator that highlights the current date as can be seen below.
Whilst this is fine in most cases, there have been a few times where I didn’t want the today indicator to be visible in the timeline, but I couldn’t work out how to hide it. Looking at the timeline tools ribbon I couldn’t see any prominent setting in the Show / Hide section.
So to hide the indicator I used to export the Timeline out to Word and then edit the resulting graphic to physically remove the Today label and the associated dotted line.
Until today.
Whilst building a timeline view for a project, I needed to change the Date Format and noticed three little Show / Hide options buried at the bottom of the Date Format menu.
Each option allows you to toggle whether the Task Dates, Today indicator or Timescale is displayed on the timeline view. I am not quite sure why it’s buried at the bottom of the date format menu, but that can be easily fixed by a quick customisation of the Timeline Tools ribbon:
- Select File > Options > Customise Ribbon;
- Create a new group called ‘Toggle Today indicator’; and
- Add the ‘Today’ option to the ‘Toggle Today indicator’ group in the Timeline Tools / Format tab as per the screenshot below.
Resulting in this much improved Timeline tools ribbon with a prominent today indicator toggle.
Happy Timelining 