Reposition Events with Drag and Drop

You can drag and drop events on your timeline for two things: to change their order and to change their dates.

Change the Order of Events with Drag and Drop

Preceden places each event you add by its start date, breaking ties alphabetically by event name. Here's a timeline with three events:

A timeline in Preceden's default waterfall layout, with Kickoff Meeting, Development and Marketing each on their own row

Preceden uses a waterfall layout by default, which puts each event on its own row. You can reorder events by dragging them to a new position.

Click an event and, holding the mouse button down, drag it up or down to where you want it:

An animation of the Marketing event being dragged up a row so that it sits beside Development instead of below it

To have Preceden fit as many events on each row as it can, check the Automatically compress layers setting under Appearance > Layers. With it checked, Preceden flattens each layer for you, so you don't need to drag events into place:

An animation of the Automatically compress layers setting being checked, after which the four quarter events collapse onto one row and the two project phases onto another

Change an Event's Dates with Drag and Drop

In most cases you can also change an event's dates by dragging it:

An animation of the Development event being dragged to the right, changing its dates from January 13 - February 2 to January 20 - March 1

There are two ways to do it:

Move the whole event: hold Shift while you drag the event left or right. Its dates move together, so a bar keeps its length. Shift is required so that dragging an event up or down to reorder it can't change its dates by accident.
Change just the start or end date: hover over the event's bar and a handle appears at each end. Drag the left handle to change the start date, or the right handle to change the end date. You don't need to hold Shift for this.

If your timeline shows event dates, they update as you drag, so you can see where the event will land before you let go.

Things to Know

You can't drag an event from one layer to another on the timeline itself. Edit the event and change its layer instead, or, if your plan includes the Bulk Editor, drag the event by its grip icon into another layer there. The Bulk Editor saves the change right away.
If you change an event's start date or move it to another layer, Preceden repositions it automatically. You can drag it to a new position afterwards.
Dragged dates snap to whole days when you're zoomed in close enough. Further out, they snap to steps of a week, a month, a year, or longer, so zoom in when you need to move an event by a single day.
The handles don't appear on bars that are too narrow to grab. Zoom in to change the start or end date of a very short event.
If an event starts when another event ends (using Preceden's dependency feature), you can't change its dates with drag and drop. You can still drag it up and down to reorder it.
You can drag an event that starts or ends "Today", because Today is a full day. You can't drag one that starts or ends "Now", because Now includes the current time, so it isn't a full day.
You can't drag an event left or right if part of it falls off the screen (for example, when you're zoomed in). Zoom back out first.
You can't change the dates of BC events with drag and drop.
You can't change the dates of an event that doesn't start on a whole day (one starting at 2pm, say), or that has an end date and doesn't last a whole number of days (one lasting 6 hours). This keeps a 2pm event from being dragged to midnight of a nearby day by accident.
If the end date is a duration, such as "8 days", Preceden saves the new length as a number of days rather than a specific date. A weekday duration, such as "10 weekdays", stays in weekdays, though one of 365 weekdays or more is saved in days instead.

If you have feedback or suggestions, email us at [email protected].