IMPORTING YOUR AOL ADDRESS BOOK TO YOUR PALM

AOL Mail v3.0 for the Palm OS provides a host of improvements and new features. For instance, along with email and Instant Messages, it allows true TCP/IP connections, so that users can take advantage of POP3 mail, web clipping, and web browsing applications. If you subscribe to AOL's Bring Your Own Access plan, you can dial up through your other ISP and then switch over to AOL Mail v.3. 

However, AOL Mail still lacks a few essential features. It cannot hotsync email from your desktop to your Palm (which means you need to have a Palm modem of some sort to use it); and it cannot sync your AOL email address book with your Palm Addressbook. Since AOL Mail, like all Palm email applications, looks in your Palm Addressbook for email addresses, not having any way to transfer your AOL address book to your Palm is a serious drawback - especially for folks with hundreds of entries in the AOL address book.

After some experimenting, I found a way to transfer my AOL address book to my Palm, using MS Word 2000 and the Palm Desktop. 

The Palm Desktop can import CSV files. These are basic spreadsheet files, which are understood by almost any spreadsheet program. So my first idea was to somehow transfer my AOL addresses to a CSV file and then import it. Unfortunately, that doesn't work. CSV stands for "comma separated value." The comma which separates values, in this case, is a comma between each email addresses. The AOL Address book was easily turned into a CSV file, but each address was a cell in a single row. There was no way that I could find to translate the row into a column. And a column was what the Palm Addressbook import required.

And then I thought, "Perhaps I can transfer the information to a table in Word instead." And that worked perfectly. Here's what I did, step by step:

(1) Pretend you are going to send an email to yourself
(2) Click on the first email address in your AOL address book. While holding the shift key, click on the last name. All your addresses should be highlighted. Send them to the "To:" field
(3) Now, select all the addresses in the "To:" field. (Put your cursor in the "To:" field. Click Ctrl A, holding down the "Ctrl" key while you also hold down the "A" key. This should Select All entries in the field.) Next, cut and paste them into a new document in Word. Do not send this email!
(4) In the Menu Bar at the top of the Word screen, click on Edit -> Select All
(5) Next, again back at the Menu bar, click on Table -> Convert -> Text To Table 

(6) Number of columns = 1

(7) Now save the document as a text file (File -> Save As -> ) Name it anything you'll recognize later. "AOL_addresses.txt" is a good file name, for instance. Pay attention to the location where the file is saved. You'll need to know it for the following steps. The default location, if you are using Windows, will probably be C:\My Documents\AOL_addresses.txt
(8) Open the Palm Desktop and switch to the Addressbook
(9) Click on File -> Import

(10) In the lower part of the Import screen, there will be a box with a drop down list. The default is Address Archive, and the file type is .aba. Change the file type to "Comma Separated (*.csv, *.txt)" and navigate to the text file you created in Word. Choose it and click "Import."

(11) A new window will open. Uncheck all fields except "Email"
(12) Drag "Email" to the top of the list so that it is directly opposite the first name in the text file
(13) Click OK
(14) All the email addresses will be imported into your Palm Addressbook. They will be in the "Unfiled" category. You can use an app like Mass Transit to move them to another category, like AOL Email Addresses, or you can leave them in Unfiled.

This article first appeared in Pocket Press, a weekly newsletter for PDA users.

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