After coming across an article on the BBC about the nuances of calculating dog years, I was surprised to find that the old method of 1 human year = 7 dog years is completely inaccurate. The age multiplier actually varies between dog breeds, and for the first two years of their life you use a different multiplier based on their size.
It’s all a bit confusing and/or time consuming for the average dog owner to work this out, so I decided to build my own dog year calculator from scratch. For this, I used the data visualisation software called Tableau, and embedded it using their free service; Tableau Public. It was a simple case of taking the logic and values in the article, creating a mini database to house them, and building equations on the back end to visualise the information into this interactive dashboard:
It’s a great example of showing the potential Tableau has to manipulate and visualise data at any scale, and also how you can take any source of data, no matter how obscure (or even if it doesn’t fully exist), and turn it into something meaningful and useful.
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