“We were using Excel as a primary source for distributing data, and we tended to communicate with data via huge lists of information. I think we’ve managed to turn that around and say, ‘You have to build a story around your data.’
“Sending a list to somebody or a huge table with a lot of information is not necessarily telling a story, or it’s trying to tell a lot of stories at the same time.
“Even something as simple as saying, ‘How would you actually segment your table? Would you show all the companies in a geographical order? And if you were, why?’
“You might have Greece on top of the list; we don’t sell anything there. And you would have to somewhere in the table structure find the UK…and maybe it’s more important that the market is performing, relatively at least to our performance. We’ve worked on lots of stuff like that.
“It has benefited us to go away from Excel and toward more visual tools. And thinking a lot more about ‘How do I present the message to the audience?’ Excel is a horrible tool for a lot of people.
“We were not thinking about our recipients either. Our message ended up not actually going across. I don’t think we got a lot out of it.
“We’ve set the data more free, given people easier tools to work with. And now we see a much wider engagement than when everything was in Excel spreadsheets.”
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