A visitor to this site recently asked for advice on importing her Palm Calendar into her Google Calendar. As anyone who has ever owned a Palm knows, the desktop software does not support exporting the calendar in anything except Palm’s native datebook archive file format (dba). The failure of Palm to add a simple CSV export to the calendar is amazing, it has been a longstanding request for years and years now.

The advice I gave the visitor was;

1. Set up a Yahoo account (free, easy to sign up if you don’t already have one), and create a Yahoo Calendar.
2. From the Palm Desktop, File -> Export the calendar using the datebook archive format.
3. In the Yahoo Calendar’s Options, select the Import/Export option listed under Management.
4. Use the “Import from Palm Desktop” section to browse to your saved archive file and import it to the calendar.
5. Once it is imported, use the “Export to Outlook” option to create a CSV file that you can save to your desktop and use in Google Calendar to import the Palm Calendar.

It’s a lot of steps, but it mostly works. You may see problems with recurring events not coming over correctly, but by and large most of your calendar entries will make it.

If other visitors out there have a better solution for this common request, please do share it with us. Many folks will appreciate it!

The original Not So FAQs for the Palm can be located here. They contain useful information related to the various PDA’s based on the PalmOS.

• Palm Pilot
• Palm
• Handspring Visor
• Tungsten
• Zire
• Treo

The file formats for the Palm Desktop files below can be found here .

• datebook.dat and datebook.dba
• memopad.dat and memopad.mpa
• address.dat and address.aba
• todo.dat and todo.tda
• users.dat

These formats apply to the Windows version of the PalmOS Desktop software, not to the native versions of these files.

Programming information on how to go about reading the Palm Desktop files can be found here. There are several user submitted code examples in various languages, such as Perl, Java, Python and Visual Basic.

Favorite Palm Freeware

Handyshopper is one of our
favorite applications. It’s by Christopher Antos and we consider it a must have tool for your Palm.

Showtimes is an awesome piece of software that uses
Yahoo’s movie listings to update your Palm with a complete list of local movies,
theaters and show times.

BigClock helps keep track of timezones
and alarms for us.

Tipsy helps calculate those
pesky tips at restaurants.

Spade Lovers Spades this little
app has consumed hours and hours of our time. Both Alice and I love
it!

Must Have Palm Utilities

BackupBuddy should be a required
purchase for every Palm owner. It’s worth every penny and more!

dbScan
by Pimlico makers of Datebk3 checks your datebook for data integrity
and cleans up duplicate shortcuts that can be caused by a bug in the
PalmOS.

Z’Catalog gives
you access to the file system on your Palm.

Software We Liked so Much we Registered It

FlashPro get almost 1 meg
additional memory from your Palm III

Action Names was our
final choice for a better view of our calendar and todo’s. We
must admit though, Datebk3 was our second choice and the decision
was very very difficult. You should try both and decide for yourself.

SmartDoc was our final choice
on Doc readers. Cspotrun, which is freeware, would have won but we
really wanted the ability to edit the docs on the Palm.

HanDBase serves all of our
database needs. Very well done and easy to use.

Pilot MiniCalc ended up
being our choice for a spreadsheet program. It works well with Excel
and meets our modest needs.