Day 4 - Palm Contacts in iPhone!

So over the lastfew days I figured out how to get my Palm contacts into my new iPhone. There are a lot of steps involved, although the final effect is very neat if done carefully, so it's worth it.

The alternative is to manually add every contact you have right there on your new iPhone, but that is a big job, and has huge scope for user error.

So here's how to transfer Palm contacts from Palm Desktop into an iPhone.

You are going to need

a) Palm Desktop
b) A spreadsheet (Excel or OpenOffice)
c) Outlook or Outlook Express

1. Export from Palm Desktop as a comma seperated CSV file.

2. Open in a spreadsheet and start correcting any errors and soing some basic admin on your contact list. To make this easier, I created sepearte worksheets for each group, this makes things far more managable. For example, I had seperate sheets for Friends, Family, Business etc. Once you are done you should have a nice spreadsheet with a bunch of rows containing contacts.

In order to make the next step easy, you want to assign a header row with the following exact titles.

First Name
Last Name
Home Phone
Mobile Phone
Home street
Home City
Home state
Home Postal Code
Notes

It is a good idea to save this as an xls file now, as a backup.

The format we need for the next step though is CSV, so "Save As" a comma separated text CSV file. If you see an options or settings box, select it and make sure that Text Delimeter is BLANK and field Delimiter is a comma.

3. Now open up Outlook or Outlook Express and go to Address book and select Import. Find the CSV file and import it. Your Palm contacts will now be in your Address book.

The difficulty now is, that your neatly prepared Palm contacts and all mixed in with your Outlook contacts.

To make them easily identifiable do a simple trick in the previous step. Outlook Express lets you sort your address by by clicking on a column heading, the problem is there are only 3, Name, email address, Business Phone and Home Phone. Select one of those that is not being used by any of your contacts, for example Business Phone, and in your spreadsheet fill those fields with something like "111111".

Now when you open up the CSV in Outlook, you can click on the Column heading for Business Phone and right away all your Palm contacts you just transferred will appear nicely grouped together. All you need to do now is create a Group, i.e. "Friends", then highlight all those "11111" contacts and drag them into that new group.

4. Start up iTunes and in the Info tab, select the Contacts section and tick the box for "Friends" to have only those new contacts sunched to your iPhone.

Sounds like a lot of work when it's spelled out, and I guess it really is, mostly depennding on how tidy your Palm Contacts database is. Mine was a mess, with Home and Business addresses mixed up etc, so it is taking me days to do. However at the end of it, you will have a nice spreadsheet to keep as a backup of all your current contacts, and your iPhone will have a perfect list of contacts, all in their own Groups!