PDAssistant help files are only available online at TrailWeb's Web site. However, the purpose and usage of this application was so simple and straightforward that I understand why no <F1> type help is required. Still, in keeping with most other windows applications, a small help window that contains the Web help contents would have been nice to have.

I first converted an Outlook 2000 contact folder to the Palm Desktop software. The first step was using Outlook to export my contacts folder to an Access database. After that, I executed the PDAssistant application and selected"Outlook -> Palm," shown in Figure B.

FIGURE B

Select the Outlook -> Palm button.

This prompted me to select the exported access database and where to store the resulting CSV (Comma-Separated Values) file. This is shown in Figure C.

FIGURE C


Select the proper files. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The last step in the conversion process was to load the Palm Desktop application and perform an import from the newly created CSV file. One small pitfall is that I ended up with a few duplicated contacts, but it was a lot easier to delete a few duplicates than to type all this information in by hand!

In order to port all the contacts I had on my Palm handheld into MS Outlook, I did the reverse. First, I exported all the contacts from the Palm Desktop software to a CSV file. I then ran PDAssistant again, but this time I chose the "Palm -> Outlook" button. This prompted me to select a CSV file for reading and to define an access database filename for writing, as shown in Figure D.

FIGURE D


Select the proper files. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Clicking the "Convert" button produced an access database that I then imported into Outlook. Unlike the Palm Desktop software, Outlook gave a few options on how to deal with duplicates during an import, but I still chose to go for duplicates, as I didn't want to risk losing any pieces of information.

Conclusion
This is the first release of PDAssistant. It's a wonderful time-saving utility for those users that need to port contact information back and forth from Outlook and the Palm Desktop application. As it's the first release, I found a few areas that could be improved upon. For example, some of my contacts have middle initials. I had configured PDAssistant to convert non-standard Palm OS fields/columns into the memo field. I would have expected a person's middle initial to be appended to that person's first name instead. Another anomaly was contacts that didn't have a birth date entered in their record now have '0/0/00' instead of a null field.

Still, PDAssistant is fast and simple to use and saved hours, if not days, of frustration. At a current price of $4.95, I don't think one can go wrong.

Christopher Grant is a Senior Consultant for Synertech Systems Corporation in Richmond, BC, Canada. For more information, visit http://www.synertech.com.