The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced the launch of a new feature on its Web site to help investors analyze the financial results of public companies.

The Financial Explorer feature illustrates corporate financial performance with diagrams and charts, using interactive financial data provided in eXtensible Business Reporting Language. It lets investors automatically generate 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 also eliminates tasks such as copying and pasting rows of revenues and expenses into a spreadsheet.

“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 will help investors analyze investment choices much quicker. I encourage both companies and investors to visit the SEC Web site, try the software, and get a first-hand glimpse of the future of financial analysis, especially for the retail investor,” added David Blaszkowsky, director of the SEC’s Office of Interactive Disclosure.

Financial Explorer’s code is open source, meaning that the public, and technology and financial experts can update and enhance the software. The SEC suggests that as interactive data becomes more commonplace, investors, analysts, and others working in the financial industry may develop applications that help investors garner insights about financial results through creative ways of analyzing and presenting the information.

In Canada, last year the Canadian Securities Administrators established a voluntary program allowing issuers to file their financials in XBRL. The program is supposed to help the Canadian marketplace gain practical knowledge in preparing, filing and using XBRL, and to help the CSA decide whether to make filing in XBRL a requirement.