[Papyrus-L] papyrus on a Palm

[Peter Hains]

Dear Valerie,

what a fabulous idea! I also have a Palm (very cool toy) but I never 
thought of this. After Jeutonne's comments, I decided to "waste" some time 
and see how easy this was. I had a quick play with a few of the more 
popular database programs on the Palm: ThinkDB, J_File, HanDBase and 
MobileDB. Of those, the latter two are proving the most useful and I think 
I'd end up going with HanDBase, as it looks more powerful that MobileDB 
(both the desktop and Palm apps appear better). The other programs don't 
seem to have useful desktop import utilities for CSV data.

Papyrus lives up to it well deserved reputation and exporting references as 
tab delimited text (CSV) is very easy. From there, you just take it to 
Quattro Pro (or Excel if you use M$) get rid of the top part of the file 
and then import the modified file into your Palm DB. Whilst in Quattro, you 
can even add Field headings that will be imported into the DB such as 
"Title", "Year" etc.

All in all, it was pretty easy to setup and I am definitely going to do 
this and register one of the Palm apps when I finish evaluating them. I'm 
also going to put the Journal call numbers into a separate DB, so I can 
easily find where I am going when at the library. At the moment, I just 
have a printed table with the Journal name and call number. You can link 
databases in HanDBase and I should be able to set it up so I can click on 
the Journal name (or something) and get taken to the call number. This 
would make finding the Journal easy. The only other alternative, as I see 
it, is to enter all those awful call numbers into Papyrus and then export 
them with the original set of data.

Shouldn't be too much trouble and well worth the effort when it is all setup.

Peter.

>>Does anyone know of anyway of downloading sections of the papyrus database
>>to a Palm pilot database?
>>
>>I have a dream of going to the library with an electronic list, finding refs
>>quickly,  taking notes on the palm pilot, deleting references which turn out
>>to be junk etc.  The ultimate goal would be to be able to hot-sync that back
>>with the main database but now I really am dreaming. If any of the other
>>reference database programs could do this I would drop my beloved old DOS
>>based papyrus in a heartbeat.

Jeutonne wrote...

>I think the best way would be to export to a comma delimited file (*.csv),
>import into a Palm database format, e.g., HanDbase, and then send the file
>to the Palm.




I'm afraid I don't have a clever saying to put here.

Peter Hains (PhD)                               		Ph. +61 2 9850 6216
Australian Proteome Analysis Facility   	Fax. +61 2 9850 6200
Level 4 Building F7B                    			E-mail. phains at proteome.org.au
Macquarie University, Sydney 2109		Web. www.proteome.org.au

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