Palm contacts -> Google

[RegGuheert]

I have thousands (literally) of contacts in the Palm and need to move them to Google to have them on the G1. I sync with Palm Desktop currently, but *could* sync to Outlook 2003 if that is a required step to get to Google.

Any ideas how to accomplish this?

TIA!

Reg

[ren857]

Can you export them from Palm Desktop into a .csv file? If you can, you can import to GMail.

[critta]

Yea, the problem with directly importing the Palm Desktop .csv is that the Google Importer is looking for a different order for the columns. Im guessing the ordering is whatever the MS Outlook .csv ordering is.

I guess im going to have to dust off the outlook? Anyone know the correct ordering for the fields for proper import into the Google cloud?

[critta]

ok, too late for this night, but soon...

all CSV's:
heres what the fields look like for Google's csv doing a simple export (first line of file)

Name,E-mail,Notes,Section 1 - Description,Section 1 - Email,Section 1 - IM,Section 1 - Phone,Section 1 - Mobile,Section 1 - Pager,Section 1 - Fax,Section 1 - Company,Section 1 - Title,Section 1 - Other,Section 1 - Address,Section 2 - Description,Section 2 - Email,Section 2 - IM,Section 2 - Phone,Section 2 - Mobile,Section 2 - Pager,Section 2 - Fax,Section 2 - Company,Section 2 - Title,Section 2 - Other,Section 2 - Address,Section 3 - Description,Section 3 - Email,Section 3 - IM,Section 3 - Phone,Section 3 - Mobile,Section 3 - Pager,Section 3 - Fax,Section 3 - Company,Section 3 - Title,Section 3 - Other,Section 3 - Address

(next lines are data rows, heres an example)
Joe Six Pack,joe@bud.com,Beer,Work,asdf@work.com,,,,,,Budw izser,Prez,,adasd q34qeqdertyu5ur,Other,,AIM: asdIAIM,,,,,,,Some Cat,,Personal,,,326-4456,121-654-5641,,,,,,123 Fake St.


Palm Desktop's
??? too sleepy now but No first line field desc, make your own export...


Outlook's

"Title","First Name","Middle Name","Last Name","Suffix","Company","Department","Job Title","Business Street","Business Street 2","Business Street 3","Business City","Business State","Business Postal Code","Business Country","Home Street","Home Street 2","Home Street 3","Home City","Home State","Home Postal Code","Home Country","Other Street","Other Street 2","Other Street 3","Other City","Other State","Other Postal Code","Other Country","Assistant's Phone","Business Fax","Business Phone","Business Phone 2","Callback","Car Phone","Company Main Phone","Home Fax","Home Phone","Home Phone 2","ISDN","Mobile Phone","Other Fax","Other Phone","Pager","Primary Phone","Radio Phone","TTY/TDD Phone","Telex","Account","Anniversary","Assistant' s Name","Billing Information","Birthday","Business Address PO Box","Categories","Children","Directory Server","E-mail Address","E-mail Type","E-mail Display Name","E-mail 2 Address","E-mail 2 Type","E-mail 2 Display Name","E-mail 3 Address","E-mail 3 Type","E-mail 3 Display Name","Gender","Government ID Number","Hobby","Home Address PO Box","Initials","Internet Free Busy","Keywords","Language","Location","Manager's Name","Mileage","Notes","Office Location","Organizational ID Number","Other Address PO Box","Priority","Private","Profession","Referred By","Sensitivity","Spouse","User 1","User 2","User 3","User 4","Web Page"

(Example line)
"","Full","","Name","","Comnay","","Job Title","123 Bussiness Addy",,,"City of Fake","FL","33551","United States of America",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"(242) 426-2425","(813) 465-6511",,,,,,"(654) 654-5465",,,"(453) 453-8744",,,,,,,,"","0/0/00",,,"0/0/00",,,,,"asd@asdf.com","SMTP","Full Name (asd@asdf.com)",,,,,,,"Unspecified",,,,"F.N.",,"", "","",,,"Whats this?

Next step, i'll take will probably be to try to rearange my Palm export using Outlook, however, failing, I'll prob just use excel, import csv and export csv stripping quotes and using google's format...

[RegGuheert]

Yeah, I completed this yesterday evening. It took a few tries, but I got it. Here is what worked best for me:

Step 1: Export from Palm Desktop into *.csv format.
Step 2: Open file in Microsoft Excel.
Step 3: Sort rows by category column.
Step 4: Add first row for Google heading names.
Step 5: Add/rearrange/combine Palm columns to create those used by Google.
Step 6: Delete extra columns.
Step 7: Save result back to *.csv format.
Step 8: Make one copy of resulting file for each category on Palm.
Step 9: Edit each of the resulting files by deleting all rows before and after that category. Of course, leave row 1 in place.
Step 10: Create a Group in Google contacts for each category on Palm.
Step 11: Import each of the files containing a Palm category one at a time, telling it to place the new imports into the appropriate Google group.

That's it! Here are some notes on the process:

1) Some data was lost/corrupted in this process. Palm is not consistent with order of phone numbers/emails and also has multiple notes fields. I plan to carry my Palm with me for some time until I can check/correct the critical ones.
2) Unbelievably Google has only a single field for name and also for address! Use the 'concatenate' function in Excel to combine the first and last names into a new column: 'concatenate(D2," ",C2)' or similar. Then convert that new column of formulas to values. I can't stand having no way to sort by last name!
3) I only used column heading up through the end of section 1 as listed in the previous post. I think Google uses the 'Section 1 - Description' column for Group, so I put Palm category here. I just decided than rather than make a whole bunch of difffernt sections, it was easier to make separate files, each only with section 1.
4) If you just clear (not delete) the extra columns, then you end up with a bunch of extra commas at the end of each line, which seemed to cause problems.
5) If you don't have any Google contacts to start with, then just delete and restart when you make a mistake, like I did a couple of times. If you DO have Google contacts to start, then export those FIRST before you start messing around!
6) I'm not convinced that Google will be usable with over 2800 contacts. I may get rid of some fat there. Probably can get it below 1000. It's funny, since my little old slow Palm Vx has NO problem handling all of these contacts and it has a TOTAL of 8 MB of RAM.

It took about 4 hours to figure out and complete all the steps. I will probably be months getting the data corruption corrected. We'll see if I don't just end up keeping the Palm...

Good luck!

Reg

[frustrated_Treonaut]

This has been an incredible pain in the butt.

Since my wife and I have both been palm users for years we needed a way to transfer palm contacts to gmail if we are to jump on the android train from the slower moving palm one...

Hopefully the following helps some of you out there. I wrote a perl script to format vCard data into gmail friendly csv. It is not perfect nor is it a shining example of perl code. If you don't like it: stick it in your ear!

I spent more time than RegGuheert writing & debugging the script but I hope I won't have to spend any more time fixing broken contacts that resulted from bad cut-n-pastes. No slight meant to RegGuheert but the cutting and pasting nearly drove me mad.

That said I don't have time to support problems that may arise from this. It worked for me, that's all the guarantee I'll give so be sure to follow step 4.

Step 0: download vCard2csv.pl.txt from this post and rename it to vCard2csv.pl
Step 1: from palm desktop export to vcard
Step 2a: open the vcard file in a text editor that doesn't suck (such as ultraedit).
Step 2b: search for any addresses that contain commas and replace with semicolons. If you are using ultraedit the regex search: ADR^;^(*^)^:^(*^)^,^(*^) replace: ADR;^1:^2;^3
Step 2c: search for any values that have semicolons between heading and value (see step 3)
Step 2d: convert file to unix format (assuming it was windows palm desktop). This was necessary for me since I ran the perl from linux. If you don't have/want linux install ActiveState Perl and maybe you can skip this step.
Step 3a: run perl script "vCard2csv.pl -in <filefrom 2c> -out <anyting.csv>"
Step 3b: If it says success, congrats. If not it will print out all the lines that are not understood. Fix those by either editing the vCard and start from 3a or add new mappings in the perl file (beyond the scope of this).
Step 4: export all contacts from gmail into csv files (for backup)
Step 5: delete all contacts in gmail (because gmail merge doesn't...)
Step 6: import the csv from step 3
Step 7: import any missing contacts from your backups in step 4

Wait that's all? No wonder google didn't write anything for this. Palm's lack of standardization in storing the contacts makes this process require a lot of hand tweaking. Forget idiot-proof this process requires a fairly high computer literacy. At first I was annoyed at google until I really dug into the palm contacts formatting.

Hopefully I don't have to write more (bad) perl for the calendar sync [sigh].

[MSchmidke]

Me too I was wondering there is absolute no acceptable solution to transfer Contacts form Palm to Android.

I tried several ways, but beneath being complicated (reordering columns of an CSV file, for example), there was a great loss of information (the labels for the phone numbers, for example).

So I sat back and searched the internet for some information about the Palm Desktop's address.dat file format. Fortunately, it was not difficult to find some, and more fortunately, it really matched the file format of my Palm Desktop version.

So it wasn't complicated to write a small tool which directly reads Palm Desktop address.dat file (and with that, really <b>all</b> information contained) and which uploads them via Google API to Google Contacts.

Et voilà, it works perfect for me. I have all my Palm contacts with all their information in my Google Contacts and accordingly on my Android.

For the case that anybody is interested, I've uploaded it at http://code.google.com/p/palmreader/.

Marcus.

[gerv]

frustrated_treonaut: Er... Google Contacts supports vCard import. At least, it did when I tried it just now, and imported all my contacts from jpilot's export without a hitch... Perhaps this function was added between the time you wrote your script and now?

Gerv

[avtobus]

Hi everybody!

When I had to transfer contacts from TREO 680 to HTC Hero I did the following:
1. On your Palm|TREO go to contacts
2. Choose contacts category to display "business", "private", etc. For All contacts - obviously select "All"
3. Press MENU button and choose "Send Category"
4. Then choose "e-mail", "bluetooth" or "beam" - this will export your contacts in *.vsf file (I used e-mail)
5. Go to Gmail, select "Contacts", then Import
6. Locate your *.vsf file and import your Palm contacts into Gmail account
7. Edit if needed
8. Enjoy

This method can be particularly useful for those who experience problems of syncing TREO with PC.

[JustinBB]

Me too I was wondering there is absolute no acceptable solution to transfer Contacts form Palm to Android.

I tried several ways, but beneath being complicated (reordering columns of an CSV file, for example), there was a great loss of information (the labels for the phone numbers, for example).

So I sat back and searched the internet for some information about the Palm Desktop's address.dat file format. Fortunately, it was not difficult to find some, and more fortunately, it really matched the file format of my Palm Desktop version.

So it wasn't complicated to write a small tool which directly reads Palm Desktop address.dat file (and with that, really <b>all</b> information contained) and which uploads them via Google API to Google Contacts.

Et voilà, it works perfect for me. I have all my Palm contacts with all their information in my Google Contacts and accordingly on my Android.

For the case that anybody is interested, I've uploaded it at http://code.google.com/p/palmreader/.

Marcus.

This worked like a charm - thanks so much