[Papyrus-L] papyrus on a Palm

[William H. Shepherd]

A simple solution would be to use the Palm memo pad, put each item on a
separate line in a preset order, and then set up a Papyrus .txt import to
read the resulting file. You'd have to cut and paste the text out of the
desktop into a text editor and save the file, then import it. I suppose that
you could set up a Windows macro using QuicKeys or a similar program to
automate this process.

The hard part would be remembering the proper order as you enter the text
into the Palm (you could set up another memo as a reminder). Like the other
solutions, it's a kludge. I too would love to see a Palm conduit that would
sync with the Papyrus database.

----- Original Message -----
From: Peter Hains
To: papyrus-l at rsd.com ; papyrus-l at rsd.com
Sent: Wednesday, March 07, 2001 2:24 AM
Subject: Re: [Papyrus-L] papyrus on a Palm


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.