The Summer09 prerelease orgs are here, so get yours now! Upon first look, something cool stood out and merits immediate posting:
Dashboards are improved. The colors are more vivid, there’s detail in the bars and pie chart wedges, and… pie charts can now display the actual and percentage values!
Dashboards are also new. Visualforce pages can now be included as dashboard components, and there’s a new “Color-Blind Palette on Charts” setting for each user. Here are before and after shots.
Salesforce dashboard with regular color scheme
Salesforce dashboard with color-blind/alternate color scheme
The funny thing is that I’m color blind (red-green), and yet the regular color scheme seems easier on my eyes then the color blind scheme.
Using the color-blind palette is a user preference – you set yourself as color-blind, and the alternate palette is used for you when you look at reports and dashboards.
If you are fine with the standard palette, then you just don’t need to set the checkbox.
The standard palette was tested on our in-house color-blind guinea pigs and they were mostly ok with it. They felt that the color-blind option was clearer over the range of colors (you can only see the first three in the ramp in the screenshot above).