I have my address book and calendar spread over several platforms. Outlook, Yahoo and Hotmail all have different addresses and calendar appointments for me. Right now, I’m trying to consolidate everything into Palm Desktop, and it’s proving to be a hassle.

I imported contacts and addresses from Hotmail through the small Intellisync software that you can download through the Hotmail options area. However, it’s proving hard to do the same from Outlook, which won’t export the addresses in the correct format that Palm Desktop can read correctly. Palm Desktop reads the information, but can’t classify that information easily into different categories [for example, right now, it imports work phone numbers into email fields, and so on].

Yahoo Calendar and Addresses export feature, which basically creates a file to be downloaded so you can import from it from any software, on the other hand, is showing the “experiencing difficulties - please try again after a few minutes” message for several hours now. Yahoo also offers an Intellisync version of its import/export software. It doesn’t seem to work, however; it finishes importing, but I don’t see the contacts in my Palm desktop anywhere.

Palm Desktop itself has limitations of its own; for example, one of the most important things for me, the alarm clock, only plays WAV [.wav] files, and only once, which is really bad in my opinion. So what do I use for an alarm clock on my computer right now? Why, Karen’s Alarm Clock, of course. I have to set up each alarm on it manually, which can be a headache sometimes if I have multiple appointments in a day.

If you know of any better software or some way to organize such information, please let me know. Now, I have to go back to see if Yahoo export feature is working again.