The 24 ORE Group is an Italian media company that is famous for printing the nation’s leading daily business newspaper, Il Sole 24 Ore. Their mission is to report on relevant business, financial, political and cultural interests—and display the information in a simple, meaningful way. Today, Il Sole 24 Ore uses Tableau Public to set themselves apart from their competitors. With Tableau, they can quickly identify relationships between data points and display them on their website. Interactive visuals empower readers to engage with the data for themselves. Since they incorporated vizzes into articles, they have attracted more users to their site and have seen an impressive rise in return visitors. When Content Manager, Andrea Gianotti talks about Tableau’s versatility, he says, “in short, it’s essential to have [Tableau].”
Tableau: Why did you start working with Tableau? Andrea Gianotti, Content Manager: The reason I started working with Tableau is because I needed a tool that was flexible, versatile, simple and didn't require any particular skills; because the various skills were already included in the product, in the tool. Tableau: How is your company using Tableau Public? Andrea: In particular, we use Tableau for data analysis and for online publication on a blog of interactive info graphics that you can watch and interact with. In short, we make it more fun, because the user can have access to data that would be boring or uninteresting if described or represented as a simple table. Tableau: How has this impacted your company? Andrea: The main thing is that Tableau is a tool that has allowed us to identify relationships between data quickly and easily, and to display them. This means we are able to communicate better, and being a company that deals with media, for us communication is of course essential. Communication of data has been improved, in fact, and this has only been made possible thanks to such a tool. Tableau: What aspects of Tableau Public resonate the most with your company’s needs? Andrea: In my opinion, the greatest strengths of Tableau are: the "wow" effect—when I present an interactive dashboard to my customers they are impressed because they have a chance to play around with it, they have an opportunity to interact with it and they have a chance to be leaders themselves when they have to work on the data. This is obviously a huge added value. The other point of interest is that in our work, we need to represent relationships visually. We have a chance to observe directly in graphics what we can only guess at by maybe looking at data flows or tables—we can put different kinds of data together very easily, and this is a very important factor. You don't need to have advanced graphics skills to produce products that are beautiful and pleasing, and you don't need to have advanced statistical and computer skills in order to represent your data effectively.
You don't need to have advanced graphics skills to produce products that are beautiful and pleasing, and you don't need to have advanced statistical and computer skills in order to represent your data effectively.
Tableau: Have you noticed a change in user interest since incorporating vizzes? Andrea: Readers showed interest right away, because it was something new, it was something that made the difference for them between static information, such as that which our competitors might provide, and ours, represented in a dynamic, articulated way, which is one step ahead. We have noticed that an interactive dashboard attracts users to our site more often, and most of all they keep coming back much more often. In this way we have more satisfied users, who keep visiting our site and trust us, dedicating much more time to interacting with the data. The fact that we can easily and precisely publish a very large series of objects and make them available to our readers has certainly made the information that we publish more appealing, and it has certainly been a tool that has made our relationship with the reader a lot easier. Tableau: Do you have any recommendations for someone looking into Tableau Public? Andrea: Tableau is a very, very versatile tool, it allows me to manage very large amounts of data that are very different from each other easily and it is the perfect meeting point between Excel and graphic tools. It has the potential of one but also the other and anyone who does analysis really ought to have it on their PC. In short, it's essential to have it in my opinion.