Actuate Corporation intros 10 e.Spreadsheet

LONDON, UK: Actuate Corporation, the leader in delivering Rich Internet Applications Without Limits has announced the general availability of the latest version of e.Spreadsheet product line, Actuate 10 e.Spreadsheet.

Actuate e.Spreadsheet is complete platform for designing, generating and distributing information as intuitive, rich, interactive spreadsheets, with all the formatting, formulas, pivot tables and charts that users expect. 

Actuate 10 introduces a host of new e.Spreadsheet features allowing organisations to address an even broader set of content creation and delivery requirements for industry standard spreadsheets, while at the same time slashing information application development times.

Spreadsheets are used by majority of business users to analyse information. e.Spreadsheet is the only solution available that automatically delivers data via analysis-ready, truly-data driven industry standard spreadsheets to any size user audience, while giving IT complete control over the distribution of mission-critical data.

In addition Actuate e.Spreadsheet 10 enables the same information to be easily and automatically delivered as PDF content to other users if needed. The release also allows e.Spreadsheet customers who have embraced Microsoft Excel 2007 to benefit from the latest version's enhancements.

"e.Spreadsheet's popularity has really exploded this past year, from the customer experience stories highlighted at our annual user conference to more than fifteen hundred downloads of the free e.Spreadsheet Designer from www.birt-exchange.com,  e.Spreadsheet Designer has really come of age, " said Jeff Morris, senior director of product marketing at Actuate.  "As Actuate 10 ships we expect e.Spreadsheet Designer's popularity to increase even faster due to its expanded formats and productivity enhancements."

The Actuate 10 release contains a host of new e.Spreadsheet features allowing organisations to address an even broader set of reporting requirements such as PDF and native Microsoft Excel 2007 output.

The release also introduces significant productivity enhancements that reduce development times by making it much easier to define charts, and work with queries.  Key features in Actuate 10 e.Spreadsheet include:

PDF Output:

With the click of a button users can specify PDF as the output format when executing or viewing e.Spreadsheet content. As a result  e.Spreadsheet can now address, at no additional cost, the needs not only of end-users who require the data in industry standard spreadsheets, but also of those who prefer to receive it as PDF reports. An additional driver for this feature is to comply with regulatory requirements which state that all business critical reports must be archived in non-editable formats and kept for auditing purposes.

Native Microsoft Excel 2007 Output:

Users can now select native Microsoft Excel 2007 as their file format of choice, along with previous versions of Excel, when viewing or executing e.Spreadsheet reports.

Charting Enhancements:

The e.Spreadsheet Designer now provides an intuitive Excel-like, point-and-click chart wizard that walks the report author through all the steps necessary to add a chart to a report, from selecting the chart type and formatting options to specifying how the chart maps to the data in the report. The wizard provides a guided experience that eliminates complexity while providing powerful new data mapping, formatting and chart bursting options.

Query Editor Enhancements:

A number of developer productivity features have been added to the e.Spreadsheet Designer Query Editor such as impact analysis capabilities to highlight the database tables and columns that are used in a query, but are no longer valid. The report author can now easily asses how the queries in a report are impacted by a database schema change, so that the necessary updates can be applied.

Another new capability is allowing report authors to use search expressions to easily locate the schemas, tables, columns and stored procedures to use when building a query. The feature improves productivity, especially when using databases with lots of objects since report authors no longer have to scroll to locate the required database objects.