Available at www.sec.gov/xbrl, the "Financial Explorer" tool lets investors automatically generate financial ratios, graphs, and charts depicting important information from financial statements. Information including earnings, expenses, cash flows, assets, and liabilities can be analyzed and compared across competing public companies.

The software eliminates tasks such as copying and pasting rows of revenues and expenses into a spreadsheet, and instead paints the picture of corporate financial performance with diagrams and charts, using financial information provided to the SEC as "interactive data" in XBRL.

"XBRL is fast becoming the universal language for the exchange of business information and it is the future of financial reporting," said SEC Chairman  Christopher Cox. "With Financial Explorer or another XBRL viewer, investors will be able to quickly make sense of financial statements. In the near future, potentially millions of people will be able to analyze and compare financial statements and make better-informed investment decisions. That’s a big benefit to ordinary investors."

Financial Explorer is open source, meaning that its source code is free to the public, and technology and financial experts can update and enhance the software. As interactive data becomes more commonplace, investors, analysts, and others working in the financial industry may develop hundreds of Web-based applications that help investors garner insights about financial results through creative ways of analyzing and presenting the information.

In addition to Financial Explorer, the SEC currently offers investors two other online viewers – the Executive Compensation viewer and the Interactive Financial Report viewer, also available at www.sec.gov/xbrl