(Vanity) Updating files for Palm Treo 700w

Feb. 8, 2006 | self

[fzx12345]

Recently, a company that I regularly work with upgraded their smartphones from the Palm VII and 600 series to the 700w. While this is useful for portability of work files in the field, many of their employees are having difficulty in updating their contact lists to the new devices.

As the older phones (which run on Palm OS) used Palm HotSync, and the 700w (which runs on Windows Mobile) uses the seemingly completely incompatible MS ActiveSync, a quick transfer of this info via PC is not usable. Eventually, I showed some people how to beam contacts and memos individually between phones.

For reasons that I don't completely understand, these files have to be transferred one-by-one instead of in bulk.

Is there a faster way to do this?

[JerseyHighlander]

Transfer old contact list to any format available that is recognized by MS Excel. tab delimited csv is probably the best bet.

Manually clean up the csv file in Excel, (this is by far easier to do now than later), you have to massage your fields to be compatible with your new PDA's file field strusture. (i.e. Cell Phone field becomes Mobile Phone field) and save the csv file in a format readable by Activesync. Probably csv again.

*** The following is how I do this, it's just a suggestion:
Backup your current files on your pda to an archive.
Erase your pda contacts folder.
Import the csv file into activesync and hotsync the pda.
Import your archive file into your pda using a manual choice for duplicate entries.
***

The following link has better info, but is not the one I've used in the past:

http://www.filesaveas.com/pdaconvert.html


Second option is to transfer all data to MS Outlook, (not outlook Express!), (not MS Outlook running business contact manager!) to a file that has the correct fields for your new pda already, and remap the imported data fields. save the file as csv, move it to activesync.