Palm Computing Devices
Introduction
This course is designed to help you learn the basics of Palm OS and to help you prevent data loss and other disasters that can strike the unprepared user. It does not cover everything you can do with a Palm - no ten classes ever could - but it provides a good foundation for anything you'll want to do later.
Some Palm users never do more than manage their appointments and contacts and consider the device a successful tool. Although that fails to take full advantage of the device, it's true that these are core tasks that most people do rely on their Palms to handle.
Palm OS includes an application called Date Book to handle appointment management. This excerpt from Palm 101 gives you a taste of the class while teaching you how to use Date Book:
Using Date Book
Date Book is a straightforward calendar application that lets you keep track of appointments on your Palm. It allows you to see, at a glance, all of your appointments on a particular day or see the times blocked out (taken with appointments) in a particular week or month. You can also see a yearly calendar and view your appointments in a list view that also incorporates to do items.
Appointments can have alarms attached so your Palm alerts you when you're supposed to be somewhere soon. They can also be untimed if you want to note that a particular day is someone's birthday or a holiday. If you have a meeting every week at the same time or a meeting on the third Wednesday of every month you can set up a recurring appointment in your Palm so the meeting shows up at the right time each week or month without your having to specifically add entries for each meeting.
Adding an Appointment to the Date Book
You can add a new appointment to Date Book either by tapping on the time of the event and writing in the description; by writing /N to launch the new event window; or by selecting the New Event menu item in the Record menu. If you use either of the last two options, you'll be presented with an untimed event. To select a time, tap in the Start Time field and use the sliders on the right to select the time you want. By default the appointment will end an hour later. If you'd like to adjust the end time, tap in the End Time field and use the sliders on the right to select the time you want. Once you've selected a time (or chosen an untimed event), you'll be returned to the daily view with the cursor in your new event for you to add a description. You must add some description to an event or it will auto-delete.
Setting Alarms
Once the basic appointment is entered, you can tap anywhere in the event description and then tap on the details button to further configure the event. One of the options you'll see there is for alarms.
If you tap on the checkbox next to the word "Alarm", a new field appears with the time of the alarm. By default alarms sound 5 minutes before a scheduled event. If you'd prefer 15 minutes of warning, or if you need time to travel you can adjust the warning time accordingly.
The built-in Date Book application does not let you adjust the alarms, apply a snooze function, sound the alarm multiple times, or choose a silent alarm for just this particular event. There are third party utilities that can provide this functionality if it's important to you.
Setting a Recurring Appointment
Just below the Alarm field is the Repeat field. By default an event does not repeat and shows as "None" in this window. If you want to change an event to repeat, tap on the word "None" to launch the Change Repeat window.
The repeat event functionality built into Date Book is fairly flexible. You can choose to repeat the appointment every day; every x days; every week; on every Monday and Wednesday (or other combination of days of the week); once a month on the second Thursday of the month (or a similar setup for another day and week); every month on the same date; and yearly on the same date. The only useful repeat that isn't included is once every other week (for some people, this would allow them to mark payday automatically). In all cases, you can choose to repeat the event indefinitely or select an end date for the repeat.
The Views
By default Date Book launches in a daily view showing you today's appointments. The thought is that most of the time you're going to want to see what you have to do now or in the near future. You can easily scroll through successive days or jump to a specific day in this view, the only one that allows you a graphical view of your schedule with details for each appointment.
If you'd like an overview of your free time for a particular week, the second view provides just that. In the week at a glance view with columns for each day, scheduled appointments appear as solid blocks on otherwise empty columns. This view doesn't provide any details about individual appointments at a glance, but if you tap on a particular block it will show the first two lines of its description at the top of the screen.
The third view provides a month-at-a-glance look at your schedule. Appointments show up as dots along the right side of each day in approximately the right position for their time in the day. You can't get more information on appointments in this view, but tapping on a particular day brings you to the daily view for that day.
The fourth view lets you see an entire year on the screen at once. It blackens any day with any appointment on it and tapping on that day brings you to the daily view for that day. The year view doesn't include dates so you can't automatically see that April 3rd is a Tuesday, but you can count from the first day of the month to determine what day specific dates fall on. Otherwise, this view doesn't provide much practical information.
The final view is an agenda view that provides a list of all of your appointments on a specific day (by default, today) followed by a list of to do items pulled from the To Do database. Only the first line of entries appears here; if you tap on an item you'll be taken to the graphical daily view for the full entry.
Lessons
Click here to see course syllabus
