Ok, so there’s a missing blog post covering the new features in the new Summer’09 release. But let’s start at the end and work backwards.

In the new charts in the summer release, there are a set of changes described in the Release Notes where we go into detail on the changes. Of course, if you are a new customer, there are no changes – there is only the charts in Summer’09, and you won’t know what the fuss is about.

One of the things we changed was the way that line charts of grouped lines and cumulative lines shows when there were breaks in the lines.

Data or not?

When I looked at the old charts, and there were gaps in the data, my heart would sink. It would sink to the 0 level of the axis, where I could see all the lines there.

And I always think “well, is the value for “negotiation/review” for May really 0? or was there no data?

Enter the Brave Few

Happily, one of the thought leaders on visualizing data, has already thought about it, in a paper on how to deal with charting on irregular intervals.

His view is that you can’t plot anything there. That is good for two reasons:

1. makes sense
2. is what you were taught in school (this line isn’t continuous)

We only have this problem in two cases – for grouped line charts, where the x-axis values are set by multiple lines, and so (as in the example above) you can see “gaps” in some of the series compared to others. Above, “Needs Analysis” is stable over all the dates, whereas “negotiation/review” is not.

In Summer’09

Now the new picture (with the same data)

Now, the “broken line” is something you probably won’t see often (I had to cheat here to get it to show something strange). But the lines that end are something you’ll probably see when dealing with historical data (like a snapshot) or with the latest period, where not all data might be valid - for instance, looking at opportunities in the future and their stages – hopefully none are in “closed/won” but closing in December 2012.