Red results in the Analysis Pane for a recipe or food record – including question marks (?) and greater than (>) signs – indicate that there is missing data somewhere in your document.

Sometimes just one or two nutrients are unknown, or all the analyses might affected, as below:

How to resolve red values in your analyses

Here are some basic steps for investigating and resolving red values in your analyses.

In FoodWorks, open your food record or recipe, then:

1.     Check for missing quantities

On the Foods tab of a food record or the Ingredients tab of a recipe, check that every food or ingredient has a quantity.

For example, in the following food record, a quantity is missing:

If a quantity is missing, enter the quantity – both the number and the unit. Then click the Save button on the toolbar.

2. For a recipe, check the ‘yield’ and ‘final moisture adjustment’

At the bottom of the Ingredients tab of a recipe, check that the yield makes sense. (It’s OK if there is no yield.) Note that in the ‘yield’ field you enter the percent remaining (not the percent lost).

Adjust the yield if necessary, and click the Save button.

Also, at the bottom of the Overrides tab in the recipe, check the ‘Final moisture adjustment’ field. This is an advanced field and should usually be empty.

3. Locate any problem foods/ingredients

On the Foods tab of a food record or the Ingredients tab of a recipe, in the Analysis Pane, click any nutrient that has a red value.

An extra column for that nutrient is then displayed In the Foods or Ingredients grid. There will be a question mark beside any food or ingredient that does not have a value for that nutrient.

In the food record below, Saturated Fat has been clicked in the Analysis Pane, and Fried Rice is showing as the problem item in the Foods tab.

4. Open the problem food/ingredient

Once you’ve located a problem item, if it is a FoodWorks document, you can open it to investigate.

NOTE: In the Foods or Ingredients tab, food and recipe documents are shown in blue. Reference foods from the data sources are shown in black.

For example, in the following Foods tab of a food record, Reduced salt baked beans is a food document and Fried Rice is a recipe document. The other items are reference foods.

To open a FoodWorks document contained in your food record or recipe, on the FoodWorks toolbar, click the Tree button to display the Food/Ingredient Tree window.

In the Food/Ingredient Tree window you can see all the contents of your food record or recipe in one place, including the contents of any nested recipes. Here is the Food/Ingredient Tree window for a food record:

From the Food/Ingredient Tree window  you can double-click on any food or recipe document to open it.

Here are the icons for the documents again:

• A food document is shown by a pear:

• A recipe document is shown by a bowl:

A reference food (which is not a FoodWorks document, and which you can’t open) is shown by a pear-on-a-page.

5. Check and fix the problem item

NOTE: If you are importing diaries into FoodWorks from our mobile app from Easy Diet Diary, some foods will show unknown values. To solve this, you can swap in a similar food by searching the FoodWorks data sources.

To check and fix items with red values:

For a food document

On the Nutrients tab, check for any missing nutrient values. Enter them in the Override column and click the Save button.

Once you’ve finished your fixes, to go back to your original recipe or food record, click the Back button on the toolbar.

For a recipe document

If a yield has been set, check that it is valid.

Check for any missing quantities in the Food/Ingredient tab. Enter the quantity and click Save.

Once you’ve finished your fixes, to go back to your original recipe or food record, click the Back button on the toolbar.

For a reference food

If the item is a reference food from a data source you cannot open it. The problem may be that the data source it comes from might not contain values for this nutrient. In the Food/Ingredient Tree window, the data source is shown beside each reference food:

For these reference foods, the data source is ‘AusFoods 2019’.

If the data source for a reference food does not contain data for the nutrient of interest, one option would be to create your own food.

Alternatively, if the nutrient is not important for your analysis, you could disable the nutrient for this database. (On the File menu, click Database Properties, then click Nutrients & Components, then de-select the nutrient and click OK.)

We hope this article gives you the tools you need to happily dig around in your recipes and food records to find and fix the cause of question marks and missing values in your analyses.  Get in touch if you have further questions.