On Tue, 15 Mar 2005 18:01:52 -0000, "Stuart Turrell"
wrote:

The thing is, i liked the reports you could print out in weather display,
but neither of the above pieces of software seem capable of producing many
reports, if any.

Report wise, (days stats, week stats, month, year etc..) what would be best.


Well Weatherlink does do some basic 'NOAA' reports but admittedly this
isn't a well-developed feature.

There's all sorts of ways you could analyse what might be the most
suitable software for your needs, but one of looking at it is to
divide requirements up into categories, eg:

1. Display of current and archive data locally;

2. Display of current and recent data (eg trend graphs) on a web site;

3. Creation of monthly reports (maybe mostly as text) by day, yearly
reports by month etc;

From what you've said, WL might be able to perform acceptably on [1]
and [2] - it won't be the best or most fully-featured in all aspects
of either of these categories but you might well judge its benefits to
at least counterbalance the deficiencies.

But for the reports, WL might miss the mark. However, (eg monthly)
reporting is an operation that can be done 'offline', ie it doesn't
need to be tied in to the constant live collection of new data and so
can, in principle, be done by another program. It's possible for
example to export a whole month's worth of data from WL to a standard
text file and from there it would be possible to use Excel or, as a
realistic option depending on your programming skills, write your own
program to process the text file data. This could be an interesting
and not too demanding programming project which could give you exactly
the output you'd like to see.

Alternatively, as you suggest, you could move the archived data into a
formal database structure. I use a utility that moves all the WL data
directly and automatically from the WL archive files into an Access
database, from where you can obviously use all the standard retrieval
and reporting tools.

JGD
www.weatherstations.co.uk