This section holds the reference material that sat behind the SharkPoint range. Some of it is specific to software that is no longer distributed; a good deal of it is not specific to any software at all, and those parts are the reason the section is still worth keeping.
What is here
- What belongs in a dive log — a field-by-field walk through what a logbook should record and why each entry earns its place. Written against SharkPoint's record structure, but it applies to a paper book or any other program.
- Dive computer imports and log file formats — how profile downloads work, why formats fragment, and how to keep a logbook readable over decades rather than over a product cycle.
How the logbook was organised
Understanding SharkPoint's structure makes the rest of the documentation easier to follow. The software kept several linked record types rather than one flat table of dives:
- Dives sat inside logbooks, and a diver could keep more than one logbook — commonly one per period, per region, or per role.
- Buddies, dive places and dive schools were their own records, referenced by the dives rather than typed into them.
- Log categories were the diver's own grouping scheme laid over the top.
- Equipment and personal information sat alongside, belonging to the diver rather than to any one dive.
The reason this matters is searchability. A dive log's value is almost entirely in what you can get back out of it years later, and free text does not answer questions. Linked records do.
Multi-level logging
Not every dive deserves the same amount of typing. SharkPoint's multi-level logging let a diver record a routine shore dive briefly and an unusual or demanding dive in full, without maintaining two systems. In practice the useful discipline is to always fill the core numeric fields — times, depths, pressures — because those are what the statistics depend on, and to treat the descriptive fields as optional.
Backups
The advice that mattered most then still matters now: a dive logbook is irreplaceable and lives on fragile hardware. In the SharkPoint range, the synchronisation between handheld and desktop doubled as the backup path, with the desktop holding the archive.
The general principle holds regardless of software. Keep more than one copy, keep at least one of them somewhere the working device is not, and check occasionally that the backup can actually be opened — an unreadable backup is not a backup. A logbook that also records certification and medical details is worth protecting for reasons beyond sentiment.
Units, and the one mistake worth avoiding
SharkPoint supported metric and imperial units and applied validity checks to numeric fields, but no software can rescue a log whose units were entered inconsistently. Pick one system, initialise the logbook with it, and stay with it. A log that is half in feet and half in metres produces statistics that are not merely wrong but plausibly wrong, which is worse.
Where safety guidance belongs
Nothing in this section is dive safety guidance and nothing in SharkPoint ever was. Dive planning tools help a trained diver check a plan; they do not train, and they do not decide. For dive medicine, decompression, ascent rates, fitness to dive and incident reporting, the standing sources are the Divers Alert Network and, for the research literature itself, PubMed.
For the software itself see the product range.