A web-based data access system is described that allows users to easily access, manipulate and share information. The users can access the system to create customized view of the data and share the views with others. The data access system includes a database for storing multidimensional data. Electronic reports are stored as report object on a server and define dimensions and members of multidimensional data that are included in an electronic report. A page generation module executes on the server to access the multidimensional data and format a web page based on the report object. A packet engine communicates the web page to a client device in a stream of packets for display to the user.