Importing Palm Desktop (Mac) Notes

This is a tip written by "Jimmy" on the Notebook Google Group Forum on importing Palm Desktop for Mac Notes to Toodledo.com and Notebook.

Here are some step-by-step instructions for exporting memos (notes)
from Palm Desktop (Mac version) for import into Toodledo.com. These
are based on my travails, posted in other threads, trying to get 300+
notes out of Microsoft Entourage and into Toodledo. It's actually a
couple of steps simpler if you're coming from Palm Desktop. I just
verified each of these steps as I typed them up, so I'm confident that
they work. Appigo/Toodledo developers, if you want to permanently post
these somewhere, please do.

Why all the rigamarole? The first issue is that Toodledo.com accepts
only CSV (comma-separated values) files for note upload. Palm Desktop
for Mac exports only as tab-separated files. So you will need to
convert the Palm export file from tab-delimited to CSV. The second
issue is that you will need to do some editing of the memo body text
in order for it to sort itself into the right fields in the
Toodledo.com importer, and to retain any line breaks/carriage returns/
paragraph breaks in the body text of individual notes.

You will need:
a) Microsoft Excel
b) TextWrangler, a free program that is available here:
http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/download.html

In Palm Desktop, open up your Memo List and choose "Export..." from
the file menu. You'll have a choice of which Module to export, which
in this case is "Memos." You'll want to choose to export all of your
memos. The format you want to use is Tab & Return. Click the "Columns"
button, and choose to export only Title, Body and Category 1. Give the
file a name and click "Export." The file will be saved as a plain text
document.

You are now ready to bring this plain text file into Excel so that you
can make some edits and convert it to a CSV file. First, you'll have
to make a couple of preparations in Excel:
a) Open up a new workbook, select all of the cells on the worksheet
you're on, and choose "Format >Cells...." from the Menu bar. Under
"Alignment", put a checkmark in "Wrap Text" in the "Text Control"
section. Click OK.
b) In the Excel preferences, choose the "Edit" section and make sure
that "Edit directly in cell" has a checkmark. Click OK.

With your new Workbook open, go to the Data menu item and choose Get
External Data>Import Text File. Choose the Palm export file from
wherever you saved it and click "Get Data." This will open up a Text
Import Wizard.

On the first screen of the Wizard, choose "Delimited". Click Next.
On the next screen, choose "Tab" as the type of delimiter. Click Next.
On the third screen, set (or leave) the Column data format as
"General." Click Finish.
On the next screen, choose "existing worksheet" and select the top
left cell of the sheet as the place your data will start flowing into.
Click OK.

All of your notes should now be populating your worksheet. There
should be 3 columns, one for the Note title, one for the note body,
and one for the Category. Each row is a separate note.

You will notice that, if you had line breaks in the body of a
particular note, they have been replaced by a dark paragraph symbol.
You will want to turn these back into real line breaks so that your
notes look right in Toodledo.com and Notebook. The remainder of these
instructions explain how to use Excel and TextWrangler to fix this.

In your worksheet, you will need to put double-quote marks ("text text
text") at the beginning and end of the text in any note body cell that
has line break symbols. This is because the CSV file format will
respect line breaks within a cell so long as the text is surrounded by
double-quote marks. You can edit any cell directly by double-clicking
in the cell. (If the first or last character in the cell is one of
those paragraph marks, the double-quotes should enclose those symbols
as well.)

Once you've done all that, you'll need to save the workbook as a CSV
file. Do a "Save As" and choose CSV (comma delimited) as the file
format. Just click on through the "caution screens" that Excel will
throw up at you and save, then close the window. You should now have a
file somewhere saved with a .csv extension.

Now, you're going to fix those paragraph symbols in the the body text
of your notes using TextWrangler. Open TextWrangler and use it to open
the CSV file you just created. Now, select one of those paragraph
symbols and copy it (command-C). Then, under the Search menu item,
select "Find..." In the "Search For" field, paste in (command-V) the
paragraph symbol that you copied. In the "Replace With" field, type in
\r (backslash r). Then click the "Replace All" button. Then save the
document.

The TextWrangler-edited file is now ready for Toodledo.com import. Log
into your Toodledo account and go to the Import page, then scroll down
to the CSV Notebook Import section. Choose the CSV file you just
finished editing and click Upload.

You'll be taken to a screen that shows you a preview of how your
imported notes will be organized. (If you've done everything correctly
in the earlier steps, your ducks should all be in the right rows and
columns, and you'll have line breaks in the note body text instead of
symbols. If you didn't, the first likely culprit is that you forgot to
put a double-quote mark at the end of one of the text cells, which
would throw everything off. So you'd have to back up and figure out
where you went wrong.)

There will be dropdown menus at the top of each column so that you can
pour the notes into the right places. Set the first column as Title,
the second column as Note, and the third column (the category from
Palm) as Folder. If everything looks right, click the Save Changes
button at the bottom of the Window.

Congratulations, your notes should now be in Toodledo, organized in
folders that correspond to the categories you had in Palm desktop!
Sync with Appigo Notebook and you will be good to go. If the double-
quote marks bother you, you can always edit them out in Toodledo, but
if you've got hundreds of notes, it's not worth the bother, and you
can take them out individually when you have to look at a particular
note or change it.

I hope this helps. The same steps need to be taken to get notes out of
Entourage, except that you'll first need to use an Applescript from
Paul Berkowitz to export the notes from Entourage. It costs a little
money for the scripts, and is a bit of a pain, but if anyone is
desperate for a step by step on that, I'll post one if I get a chance.