Also provided under the 'Details' tab are copies of the new tables providing time series up to and including March quarter 2006, comparable to that released on 7th June 2006.

These changes are due to come into effect with the release of the June quarter 2006 issue of 5206.0 on 6th September 2006. From that date, the current Lotus 1-2-3 .wks spreadsheets will be discontinued.

The new product provides a range of benefits for time series clients, the most significant of which is the use of a unique identifier for each series. This allows clients to reliably extract series using the unique identifier rather than column and rows based macros. Other features of the Excel format include:

• combining some existing tables thus reducing the number of individual tables that may need to accessed
• consistent and complete series metadata is provided for every series displayed
• a readily recognised file format (Excel) that will 'auto launch' in most business IT environments