Then, more recently, your company decided to use Microsoft Exchange Server and installed Outlook on your notebook. You've been instructed to start putting your contact information into Outlook so that employees can start sharing. But you really don't feel like retyping all this contact info into Outlook… and who could blame you?

You research documentation for both the Palm Desktop software and Outlook applications trying to figure out how to move data from one to the other. You search Palm and Microsoft's Web sites. Both Outlook and the Palm Desktop software have the ability to import and export data, but neither can read the other's data format. As Charlie Brown would say, "Argh!!!!"

Unless you wish to spend time writing code to produce each platform's import file format, you better find a third party utility. You'll do well to consider a tiny application developed by Josh Whitman of TrailsWeb (at http://pda.trailsweb.com) called PDAssistant.

Synchronized contacts
PDAssistant is an interface utility that provides Palm OS and Outlook users with a bridge to port contact information from one application to the other. It doesn't communicate directly with either database, rather it relies solely on the ability to read/write from an Access and an ASCII file. The actual import and export of the data is performed within both the Palm Desktop software and Outlook.

Installation of PDAssistant was a breeze. In seconds, I had a new shortcut placed on my desktop and another off the programs start menu. Upon starting the application, the first thing that I was prompted to do was configure my Contact Preferences, as shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A

First you have to set up Contact Preferences. Click picture for a larger image.

Preferences allow you to link up to four extraordinary fields of Outlook information into the Palm OS database (i.e., store your contacts' birthdays in the Custom1 field on your Palm handheld). You can also define whether you wish to store all the other Outlooks contact fields (i.e., Website, Email2Address, etc) to the Palm OS notes field.