Can't Import From Palm

[tonyj]

In anticipation of a new HTC Incredible soon, I opened a gmail account. I have exported 12 years of calendar, thousands of contacts, notes, and tasks from a PC palm desktop. It created a .dba file, which gmail does not recognize. How can i convert it to .csv or whatever? I was able to easily import ~1000 contacts from my Mac address book.

Operating system: OSX 10.6.3
Program and version you use to access Gmail: Firefox 3.6.3

Your antivirus software: Norton


Any advice will be appreciated.

 

[jpsykes]

the only way I found was to buy a program called dba2csv that converts it to a format that you can then import.

I forgot what I paid but seems like it was in the $30 dollar price range.

 

[KlaymenDK]

I used CSV files, but with some work.

What I did was that I created a contact in Google where I filled in all the fields, then I exported that. This tells you the proper format of the CSV file, and also which fields can be used. Turns out that a number of fields are not included in import/export operations, such as birthdays and anniversaries; for these I manually changed the CSV file (in a spreadsheet) to move my birthdays (from my Palm CSV) into the Notes field, so that I could mass-import them, and then I went through all my GMail contacts and moved the info from each contact's Notes field to the proper field.

It was a royal pain, but it worked.