Windows Users

  • In Palm Desktop, select the module “Memo”
  • Select all memos
  • From the “File” menu, select “Export…”
    • Choose a location and a file name and use .palm as file extension
    • As “Export Type” select “Tab Separated Values”
    • Click “Export”
    • If prompted, check “Memo”, “Category” and “Private”
    • after export, change the file extension to .palm
  • Import the .palm file into Notebooks, for example by
    • dropping the file into a shared book (see WiFi Sharing)
    • putting the file into your Dropbox folder and synchronize
    • putting the file on a WebDAV server and synchronize
    • using any of the options described in the import section or in the handbook

Notebooks will show the .palm file with a generic icon. When you open it by tapping on its name, Notebooks will extract the memos into a book with the same title as your .palm file. The memos will be sorted into sub-books with names corresponding to your categories. Private memos will be protected in Notebooks, if protection is enabled. The original file will be deleted after successful extraction.

In case the file is imported but not extracted, please open the .palm file in a text editor (WordPad, for example) and save it with Unicode (UTF) text encoding.

Mac Users

For Mac users the process is less straight forward, but the result is even more rewarding. You first export the memos from Palm Desktop, modify their formatting in Text Edit and import them into Notebooks.

  • In Palm Desktop, view all memos
  • From the Categories column, select one category
  • From the “File” menu, choose “Export…” and
    • For Module set to Memos
    • For Items, set to the subset of Memos (it defaults to all the memos not just the ones in the particular category selected in step 1b)
    • For Format, set to Tab & Return
    • Choose a filename, destination, and manually add the file extension .palm
    • Click on Export

Open the exported file in Text Edit.

  • From File, choose “Open…” and select the file that was created by the Palm export.
  • In the document, select one of the bold paragraph marks (¶) and from Edit, choose Copy. Depending on your text encoding, this mark may also look like this: ¦
  • From Edit, choose “Find…“ and in the window that appears
    • Paste the paragraph mark you copied into the “Find” space
    • Type the | character in the “Replace with” space
    • Click on Replace All
  • Save the file (overwriting/replacing the prior version)
    (If your text contains special characters you should save the file with Unicode text encoding)
  • Make sure the file’s extension is .palm

Import the .palm file into Notebooks, for example by

  • dropping the file into a shared book (see WiFi Sharing)
  • putting the file into your Dropbox folder and synchronize
  • putting the file on a WebDAV server and synchronize
  • using any of the options described in the import section or in the handbook

After import, the file will be displayed with a generic icon. When you open it by tapping on its name, Notebooks extracts the memos and produces

  • a book with the title of your imported text file
  • a sub-book for each category
  • a separate note for each memo, filed according to its category
  • the original modification date will be preserved if possible
  • memos that were tagged “Private” will be protected, thus they will only appear if you unlock Notebooks.

In case the file is imported but not extracted, please open the .palm file in a text editor (TextEdit, for example) and save it with Unicode (UTF) text encoding.

To ensure that the modification date is correctly set, please make sure that your iPhone’s/iPad’s date format (region format) matches the format of the exported memos..
(Example: the date in your exported memos looks like “August 18, 2011”; go to Settings -> International and check that the Region Format Example that appears on that page displays the date like “Tuesday, August 18, 2011”. If it does not match, please select a different region format that matches)