Notices

Actually I have it more-or-less working - I just feel like griping about the difficulty of debugging apps with inadequate error messages.

I imported the contacts I exported out of JPilot, and it went without a hitch, except for the city and state being reversed. That's not a huge problem, though. It was dramaless and uneventful.

Ok, my first cut at an Excel spreadsheet converter for Yahoo Contacts -> GPE Contacts is done and working. It manages to convert about 1000 of my personal and business contacts successfully from a couple of different Yahoo accounts, but consider it "beta" until a few other people have tested it. I stumbled across many, many minor problems and bugs that couldn't have been anticipated, so there are undoubtedly more yet to be found. The zipped spreadsheet file is attached to this message (I hope).

In the end I was pleased to see that the Categories from Yahoo Contacts are carried through to Categories in GPE Contacts, although GPE Contacts is painfully slow to filter by category. However GPE Contacts does not appear to recognize updated contact information by ID, so any updates will add a new contact rather than replacing an existing one. See my earlier instructions for removing the existing contacts file and re-creating an empty one if you get too much clutter.

A few more warnings:
- Don't attempt to import a vcf file over the network directly from GPE Contacts. There's some sort of bug between GPE Contacts and OS2008's network file access which prevents that from working. Copy the file to local memory on the N800 first.
- Don't edit the vcf file with the Notepad text editor on a Windows PC - it adds an invisible 3-byte UTF-8 header to the file which prevents GPE Contacts from reading it.
- Don't be surprised if GPE Contacts appears to freeze for a long time when you attempt to import a large vcf file - that's a good sign, as it usually comes back right away with "Failure" if there's a problem.

Looking at ics now. There's a converter here: http://manas.tungare.name/projects/yahoo2ical/

which supposedly is designed to work with Yahoo Calendar exports in Outlook csv format, or just Outlook calendar exports in the same format. Unfortunately it doesn't work in my first test. Similar problems to GPE Contacts, it fails with a "UTF-8 encoding error", location unspecified in a 600 Kbyte file.

Update: I tried the Yahoo -> Outlook csv -> Google Calendar -> ics -> GPE Calendar route. It's possible to do this operation entirely on the N800, but microB has some bugs displaying the Google Calendar page which makes it difficult. This multi-step transfer actually works for a few simple appointments, but a full-scale transfer produces a "Server Error" page from Google (although it seems to have done the import), and an "invalid character" from GPE Calendar when it tries to import the 1.3 Mbyte ics file exported by Google.

Looks like GPE Calendar has the same overly-picky input preferences as Contacts, and another painstaking testing process is going to be necessary to pin down the problems with any import of a practical scale.

Ok, I adapted my spreadsheet to process ics files in the same way that it processes vcf files. That is, it reads each calendar entry from the ics file into a row of the spreadsheet, with the date of the entry duplicated in column 1 to allow easy sorting. If I sort by date and cut out the past and future entries I'm not concerned about, I end up with just the next 4 months worth of calendar entries, re-export those to an ics file, and those import successfully to GPE Calendar.

I won't bother tracking down the "invalid character" problem or anything else unless it turns up in the current calendar entries that I'm trying to transfer. In that case I should be able to identify it easily enough and add a correction routine to my spreadsheet.

If anyone wants the ics calendar file version of the spreadsheet, just ask (update: attached).

Incidentally you can find the current calendar file in the same directory as contacts if you want to delete it and start fresh. Open a command line window with XTerm and type:

$ cd ~/.gpe
$ rm calendar

So in the end I am now able to transfer both my Contacts and my current Calendar from Yahoo online to GPE Contacts and Calendar on the N800 fairly easily, and I don't mind updating manually once in a while instead of trying to manage a complicated sync operation. I count that as a success.

I tried that with my Address Book on my iMac w. OS 10.4.11.

GPE wouldn't accept vCards (i.e. all the contacts in one file), only individual cards that had to be transfered one by one to a folder on the N800 and then imported into GPE.

GPE also 'failed' every vCard that had anything beyond the most basic information (i.e. if you put anything in the Address Book's 'notes' section, the vCard was rejected by GPE).

It was easy for Contacts to import the vCards file but it's rather useless without addresses, I find. Great if you only want email addresses or primary phone numbers.

I find the process too time-consuming for GPE and Contacts misses essential information from Address Book (like notes, birthdays, addresses). Both of these applications aren't completely satisfactory for me.

Ah, well. I have that information on my iPod that's invariably close by, anyway.

Chalk it up to another quirk of the OS2008 or GPE.

I don't need a particularly robust PIM for the N800 but I guess I know not what, exactly, I must be asking of the Nokia Gods.

I am atempting to import my contacts from a Plam TX to GPE contacts on an N810 OS2008. I have discovered many of the problems cited here but I have had some sucess using Notepad files, obviously with the .vcf append, using Windows XP pro as follows:

1. In Palm desktop select contacts view and select all
2. Export as a vCard file
3. On N810 in file manager, copy the .vcf file to local folder (eg: documents)
4. Open GPE contacts, menu, Tools, Import Vcard

I made a partial .vcf list to experiment and have brought in about the first 30 contacts and they display more or less ok. My whole file did not import, probably because of the two image files that Palm puts in by default in contacts.

The following format works fine except as noted in previous posts, the City and state are transposed in GPE:

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:2.1
Noe;John
FN:John Doe
TITLE:Account Manager
ORG:A Company
ADR;WORK:;;123 Long Rd;Anytown;NC;12345;USA
TEL;WORK:999-555-1234
TEL;CELL:999-555-1235
END:VCARD

Note that if you use other fields in the source file you may or may not get them through (see earlier posts).

Something else I've discovered is that if there are any other characters in the phone numbers except digits 0-9, dashes - and brackets (), the content will initially display ok BUT when editied in ANY way (ie: opened and saved instead of cancelling) any 'wrongly' formatted numbers completely dissappear! In fact, if there are odd characters in the phone number you can't even see them in edit mode.

I have just downloaded the cleanup spreadsheet (thanks given) and will see how this works out.

I could probably write a spreadsheet to transpose the city and state but perhaps this has already been done. OK off to work on this...

Thanks for the useful spreadsheet. I could import about 800 contacts into my N810. There were duplicates due to empty Birthday fields and non-empty notes fields. BUT at least I could import my Palm and Phone contacts via Yahoo (as you suggested).

And now for the challenge - I need to figure out how to export from gpe-contacts...

I installed gpesyncd in my n810 but no command seems to work, only help and quit work:

~$ gpesyncd
gpesyncd local mode
add
Invalid command: add

Is there someone with the same problem? How to fix it?

I just spent 4 hours importing Contacts and Calendar from Outlook to GPE on my N800. Following the great ideas provided in this thread I had no trouble with Contacts. I kept getting errors on my Calendar import and after doing it piecemeal for awhile finally discovered the problem. It would not accept the Euro symbol (€) ! Imagine that, on a european device no less.