I've never used writing programs either, although I keep toying with the idea of trying Scrivener. (If I do, Aeon Timeline syncs with Scrivener, so that if you change a date in one it automatically changes it in the other for you). I'm writing a murder mystery with a top and bottom story. The top story is the MC investigating the murder. The bottom story is the murder itself. So there's already two timelines and there will be some degree of mirroring as well as planning when the MC finds different pieces of evidence.
Then there's timelines for each witness and each suspect that will be broken down not just by days but by certain hours. They'll all have their own version of the events leading up to and after the victim's murder, and several will have multiple time lines--the version they tell cops, what really happened, and some will switch up their stories as the investigation goes on and their lies get muddled.
I watched the tutorial videos and it seems really helpful for creating the overall timeline and individual timelines that you can turn on and off and compare to other witnesses. There's also a feature that lets you draw lines between events that automatically calculates how much time passes.
I still need to play with it, but it seems like having all that in one place would be easier than alternating between an Excel spreadsheet, a Google Calendar, and a Date Duration Calendar. Like I said, though, I've never used writing programs and I'm not sure how steep the learning curve is.
