Cleaning your Treo's address book

July 31, 2007

If you've collected more than a handful of addresses, you may have a problem if you try to export them.

Exporting to a .csv file creates a column for each row of phone numbers and email addresses in your address book. However, exporting doesn't keep track of the labels (Home, Work, Email, etc.) that you've assigned to each row. Exporting takes row 1 and makes it column 1, row 2 to column 2.

For example:

Fred Smith
Work: 555-0123
Home: 555-0456

Janily Doe
Home: 555-0789
Work: 555-0000

exports to a .csv file that looks like:

Fred Smith, 555-0123, 555-0456
Janily Doe, 555-0789, 555-0000

So the second column contains Fred's work number and Janily's home number. The third column contains Fred's home number and Janily's work number. If you try to import this file into another program, you won't be able to make a meaningful mapping from the columns to the fields in other program. If you call the second column "Home", then Fred has the wrong number. If you call it "Work", then Janily has the wrong number.

The solution is to go through all of your addresses before you export them and make sure that everything is in the same order. Since there are only five rows and there are more than five choices for numbers, you may need to double up. It's easier to map an email address and URLs into one of the number fields because you can distinguish those from phone numbers. Then, after you have cleaned up your addresses and exported them, you can go into a spreadsheet, duplicate the columns with email addresses and URLs and edit each of the duplicates so that they contain phone numbers and email addresses, respectively.

Scott MacHaffie

Comments? scott@scottmachaffie.com