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!

NOTE: Visitor KimM commented below that http://www.kmoser.com/palm2csv/ is now available as a free online tool to directly convert your Palm Calendar to csv format. Thanks KimM!

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.