Finally, the archiving mechanism I use for removing dated material from my Palm handheld's main memory only works with the Memo database.

So, how do you handle archiving?
The ability to archive older material is quite important when using the Memo database for holding To Do items (both pending and completed), email messages, and reference material. Left unchecked, the Memo database on my Palm handheld would grow to astronomical size over time, completely filling its memory. As it is, after a month's worth of use, my Memo database grows to over 700K in size. So, at the end of each month, I archive the email messages and completed To Do items for that month to relieve the memory crunch.

The way I handle this archiving is to use a freeware Windows-based application called Memo2Web (at http://www.geocities.com/dccase/pilot/pilot.htm). This converts selected categories (Email and Completed in my case) into nicely formatted Web pages. You can store these Web pages on your Windows machine and use your favorite browser to quickly display the page and use the browser's Find function to locate specific items. After the categories have been archived, it's easy to use Memo Leaf to delete the archived material from your Palm handheld and free up lots of valuable memory.

This approach will likely satisfy most people. However, a serious Palm handheld user like myself will insist on having all this material right at hand on the device, especially if the device supports an expansion memory card.

Actually, since I often use my Palm handheld in the role of laptop replacement, it's important for me to have all my archived material available on my Palm handheld. There are a couple of ways of getting this material onto a Palm handheld's memory card so that it can be easily searched and retrieved.

The first approach is to simply save the Web pages created by Memo2Web into a Palm OS-accessible format using either Plucker (freeware available from http://www.plkr.org) or iSilo (a commercial program available from at http://www.isilo.com). Both of these will take a Memo2Web page and convert it into a format accessible by your Palm handheld. They both support searching functions. After conversion, the files can be loaded onto your Palm handheld's memory expansion card, and you'll have all the information readily at hand whenever you may need it.

Alternatively, you can select all the Memos within a category of the Palm Desktop Memo application, copy them, and then paste them into a text document on your PC. You'll probably want to do some cleanup of this information with a text editor. Finally, convert this text file into a Palm DOC file using the freeware MakeDocW program (at http://www.pierce.de/makedocw.html) and copy it onto your memory expansion card.

Either way, you'll have all of the information you'll need right at hand on your Palm handheld.

Conclusion
I hope I've answered any questions you may have had and further clarified my approach to simply staying organized using a Palm handheld. If you have any further questions about this approach, please don't hesitate to send me email.

Stephen Vance is a Contributing Editor for Computing Unplugged Magazine. His Web site is located at http://www.vance.com. He can be reached at steve@vance.com.