This is how I migrated from my Palm Vx into online productivity services, and specifically Google Contacts, Google Calendar, and Remember The Milk. This follows on from yesterday’s post, in which I described how I implement Getting Things Done on my iPod Touch — which is what I synchronise all this with so I can also operate with a handheld.

I should say it’s heavily influenced by what I did and didn’t have available, so your mileage may vary.

Contacts

1. Save contacts as an aba file.
2. Import to Palm Desktop 4.1.4.
3. Export all as vCard format.
4. Convert this to Google Mail CSV format using the converter at http://labs.brotherli.ch/vcfconvert/. (Update 13 Jan 2009: You will probably need to massage/rearrange the output of this CSV file. In particular I found that a Section called “Home” didn’t generally work when it sync’d back into the iPod, but if you renamed it “Personal” it did.)
5. Upload into Google Contacts, which is part of Google Mail

And that’s it. However, I’ve since found that quite a lot of my contacts have had their Work and Home numbers mixed up, which is annoying to say the least. So I’m going to need to check them all. But at least checking them is less laborious than rekeying them. And as I mentioned yesterday, you can use the URL http://mail.google.com/mail/contacts/ui/ContactManager to access the Google Contacts screen directly.

Datebook/Calendar

1. Export the Palm’s datebook as a dba file (datebook format, not calendar format).
2. Process this file using palm2ical, at http://code.google.com/p/palm2ical/.
3. Upload the resulting iCal file into Google Calendar.

However, this is all much more difficult than above, for several reasons…

• Palm2ical is a PHP script, so you need to upload it to a server running PHP. Since this blog runs on WordPress (which is PHP) this was easy for me, but may not be for you.
• I needed to hack palm2ical to get the timezone right. This isn’t too bad if you’re used to hacking scripts.
• I needed to hack palm2ical to better flag the recurring events it couldn’t convert. By default it just inserts the binary data. I wasn’t going to change that, but at least I could put something in the output file which allowed me to find that binary data better and either strip it out or fix it manually.
• The resulting file was eight years’ worth of appointments (yes, I know I’m crazy to try to keep them all, but I’m sentimental like that) and Google Calendar didn’t accept such a large file. So I needed to split the iCal file into many smaller files.
• Google Calendar has the annoying trait of telling you how many appointments it didn’t import but not telling you which ones. It turns out that (for me) it was only due to duplicate appointments — but it took me a while to isolate this.

To do list

I just re-entered that data manually.

It might have been easier if…

All that took a full day. I was using a Windows desktop (and a Linux box) but didn’t have access to a full version of Outlook, so if you do then you might find there are much easier ways of migrating. But for me this worked, and now I am operating fully in the cloud.

Tags: palm, gtd, productivity, gettingthingsdone, google, migration