You can use SmartDraw’s AI integration to generate a timeline using natural language prompts. You can provide a list of project milestones or ask for a list of historical events or known dates.
Start by switching your SmartPanel to the SmartDraw Intelligence view.
Click the star icon in the left bar and choose Generate with AI.
On the next panel, select Timeline.
The chat will be prefilled with some standard query language to help the LLM generate the right type of diagram for you.
Type in your prompt and hit the send icon in the lower right corner to send your prompt to the LLM.
For example, you can try the following prompt to get a simple timeline:
Can you make me a timeline that displays major holidays for the year 2026?After the timeline is generated, a chat message will notify you, and the timeline will appear inside a frame in the drawing area on the right.
You can continue to modify the generated timeline using AI. Ask to remove or add events, change event names or dates, and so on. For example, we asked the LLM to add Juneteenth as a holiday on our timeline.
You can also modify the generated timeline with SmartDraw’s built-in timeline tools as described in the rest of this tutorial. Modify colors, add names and details, and more.
If you want to see the chat history that generated the timeline just select the frame around the timeline. It will automatically switch your view of the SmartPanel back to SmartDraw Intelligence and your chat history.