Question about printing in Palm Desktop

[AMG-NY]

I'm using Palm Desktop for CLIÉ Version 4.0.1

I want to know how to print out a certain field. For example I have addresses of people that I know in England, and I want to print ONLY those addresses. In all those addresses for my friends in England I put "England" under the country section of each of their info. So Is there a way I can select all the contacts from that country to print?

Any help is appreciated, thank you.

[lelisa13p]

Welcome to Brighthand, AMG-NY.

I just ran a test and here's what you can do. Printing by Category will work. Create a Category called England and place those Contacts within it. Click on Save in the dropdown menu in Palm Desktop. From the Category dropdown list at the top of Palm Desktop choose that England Category to display, then choose File > Print. The entire data for each Contact in the category prints; you can't just print a list of Phone numbers. I don't know of any other way to do what you want.

If you don't want the Category to be permanent, you can print your list and then change those Contacts back to what they were before.

BTW, always click on Save after doing any work on Palm Desktop in order to safeguard your info.

[AMG-NY]

Welcome to Brighthand, AMG-NY.

I just ran a test and here's what you can do. Printing by Category will work. Create a Category called England and place those Contacts within it. Click on Save in the dropdown menu in Palm Desktop. From the Category dropdown list at the top of Palm Desktop choose that England Category to display, then choose File > Print. The entire data for each Contact in the category prints; you can't just print a list of Phone numbers. I don't know of any other way to do what you want.

If you don't want the Category to be permanent, you can print your list and then change those Contacts back to what they were before.

BTW, always click on Save after doing any work on Palm Desktop in order to safeguard your info.

I could probably do that however the problem is that I have over 4,000 entries in my palm, and I have about 300+ entries that I need to print out. It would be really tedious to go through all my contacts and then select which category they should be in. Is there a faster way like just searching for "England" anywhere in my contacts and then just having a list of contacts that have the word "England" in them, and then be able to print them out.

[raspabalsa]

Unfortunately, PalmDesktop does not have filters that would allow you to select just those contacts that are in England. However, you can do this in Excel. You can export all your contacts from PalmDesktop into a .CSV file, open it in Excel, filter, and print the list. To do this, while in Contacts (or Address, however it's called) go to PalmDesktop's menu, then select "Export". In "Range" select "All", in Export type select "comma separated". Give the file a name, then click Export. On the next window you can select which fields to include or ommit from the export. Once you've selected the ones you want, click Ok. Then open the file with Excel. Once there, you'll see that each field in the contacts is now a column in Excel, and each contact is a row. The columns will have no headers (at least on my PalmDesktop version they don't, I'm not sure about other versions), so it's a good idea to identify each column with the header (home phone, address, city, etc) in the first row. Then select Data from Excel's menu, and apply the filters. You can now click the dropdown list on the Country header and filter only the contacts from England. Then simply print the filtered file. A good thing about this process is that you can format the list as you wish before you print it.

[lelisa13p]

Great job, raspy!

[Varjak]

Yeah, one of the 'flaws' in Palm is that you have to anticipate what categories will be useful in the future. Sometimes I've gotten it right (grouping college friends), other times I've not thought ahead well enough.

[AMG-NY]

OK so I made a category for England and printed out everything. My question is if I have two categories for example England and a list of family members back home in case of emergency. Is there a way I could merge a "Emergency" Category and a "England" category and print them out together? Obviously I can print them out separately but would there be a way to merge them and then print it out?

Also can an entry in my directory have more than one category. For example can the person be on a family list and also be on a christmas card list?

[lelisa13p]

Palm only allows for one category per entry. The only way to merge/print would be to categorize those items the same.

Perhaps the Excel method posted above might be able to handle it. raspabalsa would have to comment on that method.

[raspabalsa]

This is more complicated, because the filters in Excel are mutually exclusive, that is, if you select column 1 for "country" and column 2 for relation ("family", "friends", "work", etc), once you apply the first filter it will exclude those itmes that are out of England, even those that are "family", and when you apply the second filter it will show only those items that are both in "England" and "family". In short, family members overseas will be excluded. If you're serious about doing this, and since there is no way to do it in PalmDesktop as lelisa points out, the only way I can think of is to use the "concatenate" function in Excel. You would create the two categories, then concatenate both, creating a new category "country-relation". Then you can apply the filter to this double category. It may be too complicated, and probably it's not worth the hassle, unless you really have a lot of contacts and a pressing need to organize them this way. What's worse, since PalmDesktop only supports one category per contact, the new data (with two categories) can't be reimported back to PalmDesktop unless you remove one of the categories.