Digital Financial Reporting

This Flex pivot table control demo gives you an idea what XBRL software will be like to use, eventually. Although, an XBRL pivot table or interactive data table would support XBRL (of course), would support text in addition to numbers, would not force you to use OLAP, and would be interoperable between different software applications.

The interoperability piece you can see today.  You can view the same SEC XBRL filing using the SEC interactive data viewer, the Firefox XBRL Viewer add on, the Edger Online I-Metrix application, the XBRL Cloud Viewer, and a bunch of other XBRL viewer applications.

Of particular interest in the Flex pivot table control, click on the "Open", and then "Report URL" tool bar button.  It brings up a dialog with this URL:

http://www.flexmonster.com/flash/demo2011/reports/config-product-charts.xml

If you go look at that URL, it is a configuration file.  It has configuration settings and another URL to an actual file with data in it.

Imagine being able to imbed information in any application similar to how you can easily imbed a YouTube video.