.FLYINGHEAD REAL USERS
.TITLE How I use the Big Four
.OTHER
.AUTHOR Calvin O. Parker
.SUMMARY The Big Four are the applications wired to the four round buttons on your PalmPilot: Date Book, Phone List, To Do List, and Memo Pad. In this helpful article, Contributing Editor Calvin Parker shares some handy tricks for making these applications even more useful.
The PalmPilot is as successful as it is today because it managed to just "get everything right." Things like price, size, and speed are a few of the aspects that contributed to this success. However, the real reason why folks continue to buy and use the PalmPilot is because the combination of built-in applications works well for most people. So, when folks use their PalmPilot, it’s these applications that get the most use. What I’d like to do with this article is tell you how I use the main four built-in applications, with the hope that something I do will help you realize the potential these applications have.
.H1 The Big Four
When I say the "Big Four," I’m talking about the four applications that by default are available when you press one of the hardware buttons at the bottom of your PalmPilot. To me, the ability to press one of these buttons with the unit off and have it turn on and go to that application is one of the most user-friendly features of the PalmPilot. And, I find that I use the Big Four more than any other applications, so even though there are ways to re-map these buttons to run other applications, I’ve still got them pointing to the same four they did right out of the box.
.H1 Categories
The key to using the built in applications is the use of categories. Categories give you a way to separate the information stored in the built-in applications (except for the Date Book, which doesn’t use categories) into logical categories. The default categories when you first start using the PalmPilot are Business and Personal. What categories you use really depends on the type of information that you’re storing in each application. What you need to remember is that categories give you a way to quickly access information once its been placed within a logical category. I have a "Book Notes" category in my Memo Pad where I kept all the notes for when I was writing my book. While I could have kept these in the "Personal" category, this allowed me to quickly locate and add/edit information to the Memo Pad records that I needed to get to.
.H1 Address List
The Address List application is probably my most used of the built-in applications. Before I got a PalmPilot, I used to carry a little card in my wallet with my most called phone numbers, and was constantly scratching out old entries and penciling in new ones. What a mess. With the PalmPilot, I can now store not just my most used phone numbers, but all of my phone numbers. I now add any phone number I ever use to my PalmPilot, if I ever think that I’ll be calling that number again in the future.
One of the more interesting features of the Address List application is the ability to rename the four custom fields to whatever you want them to be. Available from the Options menu, this allows you to rename the four fields that appear at the bottom of each Address List record. While some folks have said they’d like to see more than four of these, you can almost get the same result by putting extra bits of info in an attached note, since the note appears at the bottom of the record when you first tab on it. And, since the Find feature will search notes as well as the rest of the record, the only thing you lose by not having extra custom fields is the ability to call/use those fields from other applications.
On my PalmPilot, I’m really only using couple of these fields, which I’ve renamed to Password, Birthdate, Account #, and Misc. I use the Birthdate field in conjunction with the Birthdate application from Fahl Software. While a lot of folks will say they prefer to just keep birthdays in the Date Book application, its always made more sense to me to keep them here in the Address List with the other information you might have for that person. The Birthdate application takes this information and will then place entries in your Date Book for you.
Of the other three custom fields, I really only use the Account # field, for the records I keep of banks (checking account, etc.) and credit card companies. I don’t keep Passwords in my Address List anymore, as I now keep those (and my actual credit card numbers) in Secret! (Secret! is an application by Andreas Linke which keeps that info encrypted). And, I’ve found that instead of using the Misc field, I prefer to enter miscellaneous information in an attached note.
Finally, after having sung the praises for categories above, I’ve got to admit that I really don’t use them in the Address List application. Sure, I have them set up and place records in their appropriate categories, but I find that 99% of the time, its best to have the application come up in the All "category" and then use Look Up to quickly locate an address or phone number. If your Address List is coming up in the last category that you selected, you can turn that off (and always start in the All category) by un-checking "Remember last category" box in the Preferences dialog.
.H1 Date Book
For the Date Book application, I prefer to not see any extra lines when I don’t have appointments for them. As has been covered in many forums, this can be done by setting your Start Time and End Time to be the same time (set in Preferences).
I keep holidays in the Date Book, although you can also place these in a note in the Address List application and have Birthdate maintain them for you. The main reason I like to keep holidays here instead of letting Birthdate do it for me is that all the holidays can be set up as repeating events, which lets me avoid having to verify the list that Birthdate uses. Just remember that holidays like Thanksgiving that are on the 4th Thursday of the month can be entered as Monthly repeating events (every 12 months) and set to repeat by Day (which will show as "The 4th Thursday of every 12th month)… which works!
If you choose to keep birthdays in the Date Book, you might want to remember when you add them to add a corresponding entry a week or so ahead of time to remind you to buy a gift and/or a card.
.H1 To Do List
I don’t really use the To Do list as much as I used to, because I’ve found that if I need to do something on a specific date (which are a large number of my To Do items) I tend to forget to check there. Instead, I add these "have to do" items as un-timed (or even timed if I’d like to have an alarm associated with them) events in the Date Book. A nice feature of PalmOS 2.x is that you can set an Alarm on un-timed events, which will display that event the first time you turn it on the day its located on.
What I’d like to see is a way to have dated To Dos show up in the Date Book. Ultimately, this should be functionality added by the folks at Palm Computing, but I’d settle for some form of add-on that did this as well.
I still do use this application, but mainly to keep checklists of things to do that aren’t really a very high priority. Or, perhaps things that if they’re not done on certain date, the world as I know it won’t end.
Now, there are add-on applications that you can use instead of the To Do List. To Do Plus even allows you to put an alarm on each To Do item, and applications like BrainForest and ThoughtMill allow you to organize your To Do lists into an outline format. I’ve found that I do use these type of applications for To Do lists that have a lot of "sub" items, but will still use the Date Book as mentioned above for things I’d like to make sure I get done.
.H1 Memo Pad
Within my Memo Pad application, I keep little notes to myself about various programs, games, things to do, etc. As stated above, I keep notes here during the course of writing my book, as well as things like game cheat codes, ideas I had for various articles, and lists of programs/books/games that I’ve lent to various people. In fact, coupled with the Find Feature and categories, the Memo Pad application makes a very nice little text only database type application. The added benefit is that because it’s a built-in application, you can easily move information to and from it using the desktop software. The only bad thing about the Memo Pad is that you’re limited to memos of less than 4K. For larger documents, you’ll want to look at applications like AportisDoc Pro (not yet available) and BrainForest, ThoughtMill, and HiNote, all of which allow you to write notes quite a bit larger than 4K.
.H1 Conclusion
As you can see, despite the large number of add-on applications available for the PalmPilot, some of the most useful applications that you can run on it are built right in. While there certainly are a lot of things that can’t be done with the built-in applications, there are quite a few things that can, especially given the flexibility that things like categories and attached notes provide. If you’re someone that is running a little short of room on your PalmPilot, take another look at the built-in applications, perhaps they could be used instead of that extra add-on application!
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product Availability
Birthdate is available from Fahl Software at http://www.birthdate.com
ThoughtMill is available from Hands High Software at http://www.handshigh.com
AportisDoc and BrainForest are available from Aportis Technologies Corp at http://www.aportis.com
HiNote is available from Cyclos at http://www.cyclos.com
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
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