Actuate Brings Web Reports to Spreadsheets

Actuate Corp. on Monday announced the release of its e.Spreadsheet Server, extending its Web reporting technology to Microsoft Corp. Excel spreadsheets.

The new product, part of Actuate 5, Service Pack 2, enables users to view and update Excel spreadsheets through a Web browser and forward them on to other users.

Edward Newman, a Web services architect at a New York financial trading firm, said Actuate reports and Excel spreadsheets are used heavily at his company, which he asked not to be named. Combining the two through a Web interface would be a potentially compelling solution, Newman said.

e.Spreadsheet Server “could potentially give us a platform to run reports in a more organized, productive manner,” Newman said. “We could run certain data models from the server rather than on the desktop, and our users could access it over the Web to see how particular prices change.”

The result would be more centralized management and up-to-date data at the users disposal with a smaller client footprint, Newman said.

Actuate, of South San Francisco, Calif., also released e.Spreadsheet Designer, for creating templates that specify the data and formatting of the Excel spreadsheets, and the e.Reporting Option for deploying Actuate e.Reports via the e.Spreadsheet Server.

The e.Spreadsheet Server is priced at $35,000 per CPU, and e.Reporting Option is priced at $15,000 per CPU. The e.Spreadsheet Designer is priced at $495 per developer.