Capturing dive data into electronic logs is not quite as stylish as the old school handwritten process but there are some very serious benefits to it. A critical factor when setting it up is to make the process painless so that when enthusiasm levels fade, it is not too much of a burden to keep it going.
With this in mind, the following process has provided an abundance of data in a format that can be analysed easily. It was set up as a basic system and evolved into a little project unto itself where it has managed to produce some relevant info from time to time.
Sensible trends of numbers of dives per region, per year can easily be created in something like Excel. Less sensible trends like competitive analysis on number of dives per individual dive buddies is more complicated but can produce far more entertaining reactions.
So here is one way of setting this up:
This process uses Diving Log 6.0 – the benefit of this app is that it writes to an Access MDB file which is super easy to link to Excel or PowerBI. The beauty is that after it is set up, all you need to do is synch and refresh the XLS/pbix file and watch all the graphs update.
- Straight after the dive, synch the dive computer with Mobile Device (Bluetooth)
- Enter the details of the dive(in mobile device) while they are fresh
- Synch this to cloud/desktop as needed to automatically refresh the graphs
As long as the data is captured in a consistent format, new (and usually irrelevant) graphs can be created at any time.
Silly examples like comparing 2 divers reaching 100 dives serve as good practice for real scenarios such as analysing factors affecting specific marine life.
An interesting example of this happened in Sydney in 2017. A regular dive site suddenly had several Grey Nurse Shark residents for over a month. We dived it nonstop during this time for photos etc and logs were maintained as part of the routine.
After they had left, we were brainstorming the experience and wondering why they suddenly moved in and then left. We were able to extract info from the logs to correlate temperature with the sightings to form some ideas. This was not the intention when setting up the dive logging system but by capturing the data consistently, we had the ability to perform the analysis when it became relevant – this example is covered in a separate blog post.
So as long as the process of collecting the data isn't too much hassle, no harm in maintaining the dive log system in case it becomes relevant in the future.
