NASDAQ Stock Exchange announces use of XBRL for financial reports.

• Position: Technology - Brief Article

In what may be the most significant adoption news to date for eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL), the NASDAQ Stock Exchange, along with Microsoft and PricewaterhouseCoopers, announced the launch of a pilot program to provide investors with remote access to financial data from five years of financial reports for 21 NASDAQ-listed companies. The data, which is formatted in XBRL and publicly available via a NASDAQ-hosted Web service, will showcase XBRL's ability to allow for easy comparisons of the financials of companies within a particular industry. XBRL does not require investors or analysts to manually retrieve the data from individual financial documents.

XBRL is a free eXtensible Markup Language specification that uses accepted financial reporting standards and practices to translate financial reports across all software and technologies.

"XBRL will better serve all users of...