Getting the mix right with reporting
It is common practice to print a report of results for future reference. Traditionally there were two extremes – a detailed report that could go on for 30 pages, or a daily/min max report that summarised it all to 30 lines.
A better option for many users is the min/max plus extremes report. This shows the daily min/max when everything is OK, but provides detailed information for when results are too hot or cold.
For example, if the following results were recorded:
The detailed report will show the following results. The high temperatures are marked in red, but it is still a lot of data to try and analyse,
While the min/max report provides a great summary, it isn’t helpful for when things went wrong.
Daily min/max + extremes
The solution is to combine the daily min/max report with only those readings that were outside the required range. So now we know when the problems occured and for how long. Now there is sufficient information to determine if there really was a problem, what is a possible cause, and what should be done.