Tableau Conference-ish : Interactive CV

by Alisha Dhillon

A step by step guide.

I tuned into the session on how to make your own interactive resume on day 2 of Tableau Conference and then decided to use the resources provided and make my own. This was presented by Melody Cheung who is an Academic Programs Coordinator at Tableau.

I will talk through my steps which were slightly different from those presented, but nevertheless, if you are trying to make your own, I highly recommend being creative and making it yours. I was inspired by the many featured on this page:

https://public.tableau.com/en-us/s/interactive-resume-gallery

Why make an interactive resume?

Real answer is why not? It’s an easy way to showcase your creativity and skills all at once.

Structure this information

In the session, we were provided with resources which showed us how to structure the information within our CV to make it easy to work with on Tableau.

You can download the template with detailed information below. This was provided by Melody in the session.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18-_mrmGs0_F15c1HSJY4h0rdr7KhdSxj/view?usp=sharing

The document has notes and instructions but to give a summary of key points –

  • Fill in the cells accordingly, making it personal to you.
  • If you’ve worked more or less, or want to include more skills, just insert new rows and copy the format.
  • Make sure you DON’T change the category because this is what you will filter on.
  • I’ll elaborate, you can change it a little – I changed certifications to awards but essentially, consistency is key.
  • If you’re doing likes and dislikes, opt for a range of -10 to 10 with the negative range being what you dislike.

Chart Making

Below is the CV we were shown at the Conference.

This was a very simple example that we could follow along with. Mine differed slightly but followed the same process and tricks.

Chart 1: Timeline – Work Experience

  • I decided to categorise mine by paid and unpaid work.
  • I included a highlight option as I’ve worked many jobs at one time.
  • I also included a reference line to indicate my current status as I know I will be in my current role for a while. To do this, I followed a very simply explained blog post which you can refer to here: https://playfairdata.com/how-to-make-a-timeline-in-tableau/
  • I added start and end dates as well as activity and description to the tooltip.

Chart 2: Gantt in Bar Chart – Skills

  • Drag category to filter.
  • Totals and levels in the columns shelf.
  • Activity in the rows shelf.
  • Dual axis and synchronise.
  • Play with the formatting, colours etc – you can change the levels to circles if you prefer.
  • If you opt for the gantt, you’ll realise that you can’t make them wider. To do this you need to add the calculation of (avg(0.2)) – you can play around with the ‘0.2’ to figure what size width suits you best.
  • I left tooltips on simply to see the activity and level.

Chart 3: Rounded bar chart – Likes and Dislikes

  • You want to filter this interest.
  • You then want activity in rows and level in columns.
  • To get the positive and negative colour scale, I added a calculated field to say that if the level is less than 0, then it is negative, otherwise it is positive – IF SUM([Level]) < 0 THEN ‘Negative’ ELSE ‘Positive’ END
  • I went the extra mile and made my bars rounded but feel free to experiment here
  • To make them rounded, double click in the columns shelf and type in (avg(0)). Take the field and hover it over the level axis until you see two green rulers. This will give us a combined axis. Change the mark type to a line. Take measure names and put it on the path shelf. Increase the size.
  • There’s more detail on rounded bar charts here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMcKwbCVFXY
  • I turned tooltips off for this.

Chart 4: Awards/ Certifications

  • Filter by award/ certification.
  • Activity on rows.
  • You also want activity on shape and text.
  • Add description to the tooltip.
  • With the shapes, you can save your own custom ones in my tableau repository which will exist on your computer. When going into this, there is a shapes folder with categories. Create a folder for ‘CV’ and just drop the ones you find in there. When you go back to tableau to change your shapes, just refresh them and you will find them there ready to select accordingly.

Hyperlinks, Education and Title

  • You can format this however you like and wherever on your dashboard.
  • We naturally read left to right and so I have my name and job title on the left.
  • I included an image.
  • I added education and excluded A levels because I didn’t have much space (truth is they’re terrible) but feel free to include this if you want.
  • On the right I’ve added images with hyperlinks in the URL which directs the individual to those pages.

That’s it! Things to note:

  • Formatting, sizing and spacing – I know I’m stating the obvious but more and more I realise how much of a difference these can make.
  • The separator lines – when I started off, I saw these everywhere and didn’t know how to add these. I quickly learned how useful containers with a very small width can be. That’s all it is – a coloured container with a small width. To shrink them inwards, experiment with outer padding and make sure you untick all sides equal.

Final result

https://public.tableau.com/profile/alisha7755#!/vizhome/AlishaDhillon-Resume/AlishaCV

I hope this was helpful and easy to follow along. I wanted to make it as basic as possible for any skill level to give this a go. The demonstration by Melody at TCish was incredibly useful so when it’s on-demand, I highly recommend giving it a watch.