Actuate Offers the First Enterprise Report Creation Solution That Users Can Learn in 15 Minutes.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 16, 2002

Organizations Leverage Investment in Excel to Distribute

Report Creation throughout the Enterprise

Actuate Corporation (Nasdaq:ACTU), the Information Delivery market leader, today announced a new version of the company's e.Spreadsheet products, which include the industry's first enterprise report creation solution that enables business users to design Web-based, fully functional Microsoft Excel reports with virtually no training. Actuate's new e.Spreadsheet Designer uses a patent-pending spreadsheet paradigm to generate dynamic enterprise reports based on information extracted from disparate data sources. Organizations are able to maintain a "single version of the truth" and retain control of data access, while distributing day-to-day report creation across the enterprise to a new set of users.

With an increasing focus on corporate governance, enterprise reporting has become a critical function to organizations and, as a result, IT departments have become clogged with daily report development requests. Companies are struggling with the need to develop and deliver timely reports to executives, employees, customers and business partners while retaining control over data access, data integrity and corporate branding. Typically, only 5% of an organization has the ability to design and distribute enterprise reports due to training-intensive report creation tools. Actuate's e.Spreadsheet Designer addresses this need by immediately expanding the pool of enterprise report creators to anyone who is familiar with Excel.

Tremendous Business Benefits

Actuate's new e.Spreadsheet products allow organizations to reduce costs by offloading IT report creation to business users, who in turn are able to increase their effectiveness by delivering refreshable reports to executives, employees, customers and partners in a timely manner. Employees increase productivity by eliminating the need to port data to Microsoft Excel. Companies eliminate the creation of manual, one-off Excel reports, which may contain outdated or erroneous data. Customer satisfaction increases with the organization's ability to deliver more timely and accurate data access. Actuate's e.Spreadsheet products provide report templates to empower organizations to maintain their corporate identity through a personalized, yet consistently branded report design.

"With the new Excel report creation paradigm, our customers are not only able to create and deliver familiar spreadsheet reports to their end-users, but are now able to empower their business users to design reports on their own," said Desta Buchowski, director of product management at Selectica. "As a result, we are able to extend components of Selectica's product suite to address the needs of a larger market of end-users across the organization without additional burden on the IT department."

"The Actuate e.Spreadsheet Designer is revolutionary," said Cy Comer, Actuate administrator at Core Data Resources. "The new yet familiar features of the Range Editor and Query Wizard within the Actuate e.Spreadsheet Designer will mean that our end-users can leverage their existing Excel expertise to create spreadsheet reports. Utilizing Actuate's unique spreadsheet paradigm these reports can be refreshed with changing data while preserving formulas, calculations, and graphs."

"In order to operate as a real-time enterprise, organizations need to give employees, customers and partners access to timely, personalized information while maintaining security and data integrity," said Mike Thoma, vice president of marketing strategy at Actuate. "Our research clearly showed that the number one requested reporting tool is Microsoft Excel, but the market lacked a solution that enabled users to create consistent enterprise reports using a spreadsheet paradigm. Actuate has developed a truly innovative product that gives anyone in the organization the ability to generate reports without compromising corporate security or data integrity."

"The business users at our customers have demanded new and more powerful methods to do custom analysis, especially in the spreadsheet format they already know and use," said Dan Welch, vice president of client services at Callidus Software. "The Actuate e.Spreadsheet Designer leverages the existing best-of-breed integration of Actuate e.Report Server with our TrueComp Enterprise Incentive Management product suite to provide the most complete and powerful reporting capability in the EIM industry. We will empower these users with the ability to create their own reports while maintaining the integrity of critical and sensitive compensation and salary data. At the same time, we extend the reach and benefit of our industry-leading application."

New e.Spreadsheet Designer Features

Actuate's new version of e.Spreadsheet Designer allows business users to design reports using a wizard and spreadsheet editor to generate interactive Excel reports which can be securely Web-published inside and outside the firewall.

Range Editor(TM) -- The Range Editor is a patent-pending technology that allows the user to design a report using a familiar spreadsheet paradigm. Users can format data from a query into a spreadsheet report using a simple spreadsheet-like interface. This capability allows report developers to toggle between data sheet and design views to create highly formatted Excel spreadsheet reports that change dynamically based on the data retrieved by parameterized queries. The design is saved as an editable XSL style sheet.

Query Wizard -- A point-and-click wizard empowers users to define data sources by specifying a query that extracts data from tables using a spreadsheet-like user interface. Users have the freedom to create queries without writing a single line of code.

Query Design Editor -- The Query Design Editor connects data sources and allows users to design queries without having knowledge of SQL. The user can modify parameterized queries using a drag-and-drop GUI. The GUI allows users to build a sophisticated parameterized SQL query in an interactive fashion and saves output as a standard SQL query for future use.

Platform Support, Pricing and Availability

Actuate e.Spreadsheet Designer supports Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP. The e.Spreadsheet Option server component supports Windows NT, Windows 2000, Solaris, HP/UX and AIX. Software support includes Microsoft Excel 97, 2000 and 2002. Support for JRE 1.2.2, Netscape 4,5,6 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 4,5,6 is included. Language support includes U.S. English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese as well as internationalization for 50 languages and double-byte support.

Actuate's new e.Spreadsheet products will be generally available in Q1 2003 and include flexible pricing options for both processor-based and named-user licensing.

About Actuate Corporation

Actuate Corporation is the leading provider of Information Delivery solutions for Global 2000 companies and packaged application software vendors. Actuate provides the most effective platform for retrieving business information from corporate databases and delivering interactive Web pages and Excel spreadsheets to customers, prospects, partners and employees. Its infrastructure software is the foundation for applications such as client reporting, key performance indicators, CRM and e-Procurement delivered to communities of information consumers ranging from tens to millions. Actuate content is seamlessly integrated into corporate Web sites and packaged applications, and can be printed and used to exchange data with other applications. By instantly delivering personalized content over the Web to all enterprise constituencies -- without downloads -- companies using Actuate can increase revenue, reduce costs and improve customer service. Actuate has over 1,900 direct customers and over 250 OEM partners.

Note to Editors: Actuate is a registered trademark of Actuate Corporation. e.Spreadsheet is a trademark of Actuate Corporation. Other company names and trademarks are trademarks of their respective companies.