UPDATE (7 Oct 2014) : This is now available in form of chrome extension, Try it out @ AppExchange or https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/auto-refresh-salesforce-d/mogildlgjglckdcfclpbcbidpdkjgeeb or http://satrangtech.com/products.htm#5

Is there a way we can have Salesforce Dashboard Auto-Refresh every few seconds (not recommended) or every x minutes or every x hours …?

Standard Out of box functionality does allow to refresh dashboard, but the lowest level of refresh interval is DAILY or WEEKLY or MONTHLY.

Lets say you want to have(display) a Sales Monitor always LIVE showing real time data, how do you achieve that?

There’s no direct way of doing it, but JS (as always) comes to the rescue …

  1. Log in to Computer (which is streaming output to LIVE monitor) , open Chrome browser (will try to update the script later to make it work in all browsers)
  2. Login to Salesforce and Navigate to desired Dashboard
  3. Delete url from  address/url bar, type (or copy+paste) below code and hit enter in address/url bar. (Make sure javascript: at start is there, chrome does remove it when copy pasted)

    javascript:function autorefresh() {document.getElementById('refreshButton').click();setTimeout(autorefresh, 5000);}autorefresh();

  4. Now do a full screen and enjoy Dashboard Live Monitor 🙂

 Please Note:

  1. 5000 represents 5000 milli seconds ie 5 seconds, so change the same according to your requirements ie if you want it to refresh every minute change the value to 60000
  2. This is not a recommended way, as its a tweak and might not work in future. (But as of now its working great and helps in having real time monitor of your favorite dashboard, so enjoy!)

Might be this can be an admin tool or a chrome extension, will try to make one when I get time and chance 🙂