9
Jan
written by cail.cn • posted in How-To • 6,496 views 6 comments

While GooSync has the free service to sync the calendar from Palm to Google Calendar, their contact sync service is NOT free. So, I googled and had the following
http://androidcommunity.com/forums/f7/palm-contacts-google-1516/

Palm contacts -> Google

Yeah, I completed this yesterday evening. It took a few tries, but I got it. Here is what worked best for me:
Step 1: Export from Palm Desktop into *.csv format.
Step 2: Open file in Microsoft Excel.
Step 3: Sort rows by category column.
Step 4: Add first row for Google heading names.
Step 5: Add/rearrange/combine Palm columns to create those used by Google.
Step 6: Delete extra columns.
Step 7: Save result back to *.csv format.
Step 8: Make one copy of resulting file for each category on Palm.
Step 9: Edit each of the resulting files by deleting all rows before and after that category. Of course, leave row 1 in place.
Step 10: Create a Group in Google contacts for each category on Palm.
Step 11: Import each of the files containing a Palm category one at a time, telling it to place the new imports into the appropriate Google group.

That’s it! Here are some notes on the process:

1) Some data was lost/corrupted in this process. Palm is not consistent with order of phone numbers/emails and also has multiple notes fields. I plan to carry my Palm with me for some time until I can check/correct the critical ones.
2) Unbelievably Google has only a single field for name and also for address! Use the ‘concatenate’ function in Excel to combine the first and last names into a new column: ‘concatenate(D2,” “,C2)’ or similar. Then convert that new column of formulas to values. I can’t stand having no way to sort by last name!
3) I only used column heading up through the end of section 1 as listed in the previous post. I think Google uses the ‘Section 1 – Description’ column for Group, so I put Palm category here. I just decided than rather than make a whole bunch of difffernt sections, it was easier to make separate files, each only with section 1.
4) If you just clear (not delete) the extra columns, then you end up with a bunch of extra commas at the end of each line, which seemed to cause problems.
5) If you don’t have any Google contacts to start with, then just delete and restart when you make a mistake, like I did a couple of times. If you DO have Google contacts to start, then export those FIRST before you start messing around!
6) I’m not convinced that Google will be usable with over 2800 contacts. I may get rid of some fat there. Probably can get it below 1000. It’s funny, since my little old slow Palm Vx has NO problem handling all of these contacts and it has a TOTAL of 8 MB of RAM.

It took about 4 hours to figure out and complete all the steps. I will probably be months getting the data corruption corrected. We’ll see if I don’t just end up keeping the Palm…

Good luck!

Reg Guheert

I tried the csv direct import – really bad. It is time for some tuning …

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