[Papyrus-L] papyrus on a Palm

[Valerie Porter]

Peter,

At your suggestion I downloaded the demo version of HanDBase and was
pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to use. I have put my full papyrus
database close to 1000 references complete with abstracts on my palm pilot
for ease of reference wherever I am!!! I can search easily, display and copy
subsets of references; add comments while reading a paper and I have added
checkboxes for things like whether I have the paper copy on file or not. All
this at my fingertips and it doesn't even take up a full 2MB of the 8MB on
my Palm Vx!!!!

I exported the refs from papyrus in a modified version of the comma format,
then opened the file in excel, with a quick excel macro opened the file
removed the headerlines  sorted the references (to remove blank lines),
added new column headings (which would become field headings) and resaved
the file in .csv format. I then opened this file in the desktop version of
HanDBase and after a few tweaks uploaded the entire thing to my Palm Pilot.
I still have a few bugs to workout in the return pathway ie getting the
comments added on the Palm pilot into my papyrus database, without loosing
fields that I did not bother to download to the Palm- such as keywords. I'll
have to hit the Papyrus manual to see if that is possible.

Thanks for your suggestions, my life has just got a whole lot more
mobile!!!!!! I am totally going to register and pay the bargain price of $25
for HanDBase it is a great companion to my palm pilot - I can think of all
sorts of other uses for it too!

Valerie


----- Original Message -----

> 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.