Notion Masterclass: Build Historical Timelines with Board View

Notion’s board view can be turned into a flexible historical timeline—especially for events spanning decades or centuries—by leaning on grouping, relations, and formulas instead of relying on Notion’s built-in timeline database view. The core move is to store each event with a date (or date range), then create board views that group cards by year, month, or even “century” buckets computed from formulas. That approach makes long-range history easier to scan and reorganize as the dataset grows.

The build starts with a simple table schema: a title for the historical event, a date property that can be a single date or a date range, a text description, and a cover image using a Files & media field. A checkbox (“show”) controls whether an event appears on the timeline. From there, a board view (named “board”) is created and grouped by the date property—choosing “year” as the grouping unit, hiding empty groups, and sorting chronologically. The result is a timeline-like board where years appear as columns at the top, with event cards inside.

As soon as multiple entries belong under one umbrella event, the structure gets more powerful. Titles like “Historical event A” followed by “A1, A2, A3…” are handled by adding a relation property (e.g., “sub events”) that links child cards to a parent event. With a two-way relation set up, each sub event automatically displays its parent, and the board cards can be configured to show related sub events for quick reference. This lets the board behave like a nested timeline: broad eras at the top, detailed moments inside each card.

The method scales by adding additional board views. One variant groups by month and year, and another groups by centuries using a computed “started” formula. The century grouping works by extracting the first year an event begins (via a formula like year(dateProperty)) and then grouping by that computed value in 100-year increments. Another formula creates a month label using formatDate(date, “MMMM”), enabling subgrouping by month within each year. When month ordering matters, months may need manual sorting rather than alphabetical ordering.

For datasets that don’t fit cleanly into a date property—such as BC/AD ranges stored as text—the workflow shifts to parsing strings. A “started” formula extracts the first year from a “year range” text field, handles BC by converting it into negative numbers, and then feeds that numeric value into century grouping. The same idea can be adapted when the year range is embedded in the title: a regular-expression-based formula isolates the content inside parentheses, extracts the first year, and converts it into a sortable number. The payoff is a timeline board that can include negative years, nest subgroups inside cards, and remain readable for events stretching across centuries.

The transcript also contrasts this approach with Notion’s timeline database view, noting its limitations for long spans of time. For history that stretches across decades or centuries, board views with formulas and grouping are presented as the more practical visualization tool, with a personal “Red’s historical timeline” setup as the preferred configuration.