Get your Palm Memos onto your Android phone in 7 easy steps!

In this continuing series on my conversion from PalmOS to Android I discuss my solution for getting your PalmOS Memos onto you Android hand held computer. To read Part 3 click here: SplashID: Palm to Android

This might have been the simplest conversion I’ve made thus far. You know exactly what you want. You want all your Palm memos, properly formatted and in appropriate categories magically transported to your Android device. My solution involves using Note Everything from Softxperience. Their website appears to be in German only. You can download Note Everything from the Android Market for free. There is also a Note Everything Pro version that gives extra bells and whistles. But, thankfully you don’t need to shell out for the Pro version to import your Palm Memos.

 Transfer Memos From PalmOS to Your Android
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1. Sync your memos to your Palm Desktop. If you don’t have the Desktop software you can get it here: Palm Desktop Software.
If your Hotsync hangs while you are syncing your Memos, like mine did, you may have corrupted records in your Memo Pad. I used Pimlico Software’s dbscan software (located here dbScan) to Remove All Deleted Records.

2. In the Palm Desktop choose Memos, highlight all your Memos and then File -> Export. Choose “csv,txt” file format and choose a location and name for your exported file. Place a check mark next to Category and Memo leaving Private unchecked. Also, re-order the three items so that the order is Category, Memo, then Private.


3. Connect and mount your Android device via USB to your computer. Then, copy the file you created in step 2 to your device.

4. Download Note Everything from the Android Market and install it.

5. In Note Everything. Select the Menu then Import. Next choose “Import from Palm Memos”. Feel free to visit the web site that pops up. (Basically these instructions.)

6. Navigate to and choose the csv file you transferred onto your Android’s SD card in steps 3.

7. That’s it. Your Palm Memos are now on your Android device in separate Note Everything folders. Incidental, folders are accessible by selecting the Menu and choosing Select Folder.

Told you that was easy.

Happy Dancing.

Terry.


Please leave comments below. If you have questions feel free to post them our new forum here.

90 thoughts on “Get your Palm Memos onto your Android phone in 7 easy steps!

  1. thanks for the tutorial, I had a tough time shifting my palm memos to my iphone and still haven’t.. used Evernote for it, but they still are mainly in the cloud

    I loved the fact that Android could shift them ( am using Froyo, HTC Legend). I initially exported them separately as categories and ran into problems

    1. Each note is export into the program as a folder and the individual notes have all the same name, that of the original category they were in on my Palm Treo. For example, I would get 200 plus notes with the name “Clinical” or “Business”, so I can’t search them

    2. So I manually deleted 300 plus notes (there was no delete all button found, however hard I looked)

    3. I then imported the entire memo section (1200 plus memos) into a single CSV file, making sure the private column was unticked and in order

    4. I then transferred it to the SD card and started import

    5. But I got the message that the file is too large for import,

    So, now, what do I do, should I import from outlook?

  2. Austin,

    I’ve not tried this myself but, what if in step 2 you choose a particular category then do the export. That should give you a file with only the memos from that category. Import that one into Note Everything then repeat for the next category and so on.

    Let us know if that works.

    Terry.

  3. Thanks Terry
    that worked like a charm your instructions were clear and easy to follow.
    can you help with transporting from my palm penticon luach calendar all my stored events birthdays and anniversarys.
    i would hate to think i have to retype all those saved events.
    Thanks again
    sam

  4. what a disappointment. you mean “private” palm memos can’t be handled by this German Note Everything? What’s the point. Of course we can put open for all to see “notes” on android. heck i could do that on my first gsm phone ever. the whole point is to maintain functionality of confidential data too.

  5. Kiers,

    What you could do is make all private notes public on your Palm before the migration. Then once your notes are in Note Everything then you can encrypt the notes again. With the note opened in Note Everything choose “Menu -> More -> Encrypt”. Depending on how may private notes you have that may be easy or a pain. But, it would get you the result you want.

    Of course, Note Everything is not the only solution out there. This is only the one I used. Plus, I had no private notes to migrate.

    Terry

  6. clear and concise instructions. best of all, it worked!!
    i now have full access to my palm memos on my htc android phone.
    thank you so very much.

  7. I have been using palm handhelds for the last 15 years. especially the memo app. recently my palm tx stopped working and i am left with the memos and all the datas only on my desktop. I have been using the memo application on my handheld and the desktop all these years and it was a joy to use this on both devices. please help me find an os and a devise which i can use the way which i used to. my main priority is to sync memo and docstogo on both my handheld and desktop.

    please help shehasil

  8. shehasil,

    There are a few ways to accomplish this.

    If you use the procedure outlined above you could add the Note Everything Google Docs extension to Note Everything. Then you could easily export your notes to Google Docs where you could edit them on your desktop. You can also synchronize your Microsoft documents between Docs2Go and Google Docs.

    If you did not want to sync your data to the ‘cloud’ you could use a program like B-Folders to sync your data locally between your Android device and your Desktop.

    Hope this helps,

    Terry.

  9. Hello Terry: thank you very much for taking the time to figure these things out. You are a lifesaver. I had a total of 1,561 memos to transfer. Thanks again.

  10. All went well until l tried to find “Import” in the Note Everything menu. My menu shows Delete, Revert, Share Note, Search, Note Info, and Create Shortcut.

    My Icon for Note Everything shows “Quick Note” and when I tap it, it opens a new blank note and only the above menu is available. One time, and one time only, it did open to a different page, and I could get the menu with “Import”, but I have not been able to get there again.

    Any idea what I am doing wrong?

  11. Jim,

    The menu you are describing is the one that comes up in a note. You need to be back at the list of notes, not inside of a note. Then Menu -> More -> Import.

    Terry

  12. Thanks Terry

    The trouble was that somehow I put the “Quick Note” icon on my screen instead of the main Note Everything icon. I don’t understand how than happened, but I had to re-download the app to get the proper icon.

    Now Note Everything seems to import only from the Droid SD card. I downloaded my Palm notes to the Droid internal memory, since I don’t have a SD card. Is there some way I can direct Note Everything to that location?

    Jim

  13. Jim,

    I don’t think Note Everything has an option to import from internal memory. I am surprised your Droid did not come with an SD card? Many Apps look for one to store information.
    So, my suggestion would be to get an SD card

    Terry.

  14. Works perfectly.
    Note It had to convert le csv (the one obtained through Palmdesktop) to UTF8 characters set (windows Seve-French) to avoid strange translation !!
    Thanks for the job !

  15. Hi
    I just bought a Samsung Galaxy Note. Trying to migrate all the memos from PalmTreo 650 to the new Android phone.

    Initially, I tried the method that you mentioned for a single csv, txt file in the SD card in the phone. It worked. So I continue with other files in one shot, however, it did not worked subsequently. it kept showing synclog.txt in the SD card. I could not locate the files that I wanted to migrate. So I tried to un-installed and re-installed again, but it failed to work. Could you kindly help. Thanks

  16. chonghwa98,

    Where are you saving the file you create in step 2?

    Are you then copying that file from your PC to your Android device? If so, where are you copying it to?

    This location is where you need to navigate to on your Android in step 6.

    Let me know if this helps.

    Terry.

  17. Thanks for your great tips. I want to know if there is a way to do text shortcuts like in the Palm for adding a date or note etc. Remember that bow kind of stroke and then a combination of letters?
    Thanks in advance

  18. Hello, Sir.

    I want to be able to work like I did with my PalmV / palmOne scenario…
    – create and/or alter Memos on my PC or my Samsung Galaxy Tab10.1
    – sync these new/changed files between my Tab and my PC

    I am already able to use Dropbox to sync .doc or .txt files between my Tab and PC. But the free version of Dropbox only has a single “registered directory” for all files.

    Assuming I am able to export my palmOne Memos to my Tabusing your instructions…

    – can Note Everything read the Exported Memo (.csv or .txt) file from my Samsung Galaxy Tab10.1 Internal Memory?

    – is there a sync utility (say one that is better than Dropbox) which can handle sync of changed files across multiple directories?

    – if Note Everything is used on the Tab to alter or create Memos, what utility can be used to create/alter Memos on the PC and still maintain complete compatibility?

    I already found that OpenOffice MS-Word compatible documents from my PC are corrupted when sent back to the PC after altering on my Tab using Polaris (which comes with my Tab).

    Thank You, Brian

  19. bro all went on fine.. but its all in one folder instead of been seperated in each of its own.. wen i opened it up all my memos are in file.. a super long one

  20. Thank you! hooray!!!! I’ve converted 12 years of Palm memos to my android Bionic! I’ve been waiting for this day! Next feat is to convert 12 years of calendar!

  21. Being the goto program for ex palm psmemo users (sigh) Is there any way to search “within” a category with Note Everything Free or Paid Version?

    I have a LOT of pam notes used for school, work and play and I don’t want to find all notes with “key” in them from every single note conglomerated into one big flatfile when I’m searching for “key” in my cisco notes “category” which pushed my 755p to the limit in size.

    Admirably, Note Everything will take very large notes from the 755p. But until I can find an android program that will search in categories I’m hanging onto my 4 bux for a pro notepad app. Its back to the Palm Tungsten C for now, large 755p note’s can be used normally in it by transferring the file manually over IR from one palm to the other. Clunky but well worth it using psmemo.

  22. Being the goto program for ex palm psmemo users (sigh) Is there any way to search “within” a category with Note Everything Free or Paid Version?

    I have a LOT of pam notes used for school, work and play and I don’t want to find all notes with “key” in them from every single note conglomerated into one big flatfile when I’m searching for “key” in my cisco notes “category” which pushed my 755p to the limit in size.

    Admirably, Note Everything will take very large notes from the 755p. But until I can find an android program that will search in categories I’m hanging onto my 4 bux for a pro notepad app. Its back to the Palm Tungsten C for now, large 755p note’s can be used normally in it by transferring the file manually over IR from one palm to the other. Clunky but well worth it using psmemo.

  23. Gracias, funciono, existe otra aplicacion llamada note palm semejante a la que no pude copiarle ni en formato mpa ni en scv.txt, este metodo me funciono pero no organizo por carpetas mis memos, que eran alrededor de 16,894,

  24. I tried to import my palm memos. I selected all my memos and they seemed to export OK (at least a file is created and I can view it in MS excel where the text is readable). When I import memos I get an error saying :
    “Import: Error!invalid file format”
    Any idea what I could do to debug/fix this problem?

  25. I followed you steps and got over 10,000 Note Everything files on my Galaxy, none of them contained any data from my Palm Pilot. Any advice

  26. Wow! Thank you Terry! Memo and Time Tracking were my biggest concerns in converting to Android, and your posts make it easy enough for this caveman to do it… Thanks!

  27. I have a new Galaxy III & wondered if one can use EVERNOTE on my Galaxy to hold all my current Palm memos? I am new to the world of androids so any help is appreciated.

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