However, there's a method to this madness. Another great feature carried over from Claris Organizer is the ability to attach any item in Palm Desktop (or on your hard drive for that matter) to any other item. So, if you have an appointment with a client on Monday at 9:30 a.m., you can attach her address book entry, a couple of related To Do items, and a ClarisWorks document to this appointment in your desktop Date Book. Of course, these links aren't synchronized to your Palm handheld. It wouldn't know what to do with them.

With all this linking going on, Palm's software engineers had to find a clever way to support the handheld's ability to attach notes without confusing Palm Desktop. The end result is the rather involved process outlined by David Pogue at http://palm.com/support/macintosh/attachnotemac.html.

Still, although it's an involved process, it's nonetheless a logical one. I see no reason why it could not be done automatically. All it would take is a simple script that opened a new note, named it appropriately, and attached it to the item in question.

Please Palm, give us a one-click way to attach handheld notes.

6. Easy access to the Copy All function
The Palm Desktop for Macintosh Address Book offers some very cool copy features, as shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A


The Copy Special sub menu offers almost every copying capability you might need. Roll over picture for a larger image.

You'll notice that Copy All isn't one of the options listed, though. And, unlike Palm Desktop for Windows, you can't simply highlight a name in your Address Book and use the basic copy command to copy the entire text of that entry to the clipboard.

However, this doesn't mean that this capability is missing--it's just hidden. When you use the Find Contact command from the Instant Palm Desktop menu (yet another slick Mac-only feature), the resulting Contact Card offers a Copy All button, as shown in Figure B.

FIGURE B


It may not be easy to find, but don't despair: there is a Copy All feature. Roll over picture for a larger image.

This is a great function, so please, next time around, put this command in the Copy Special sub menu where we can more easily get to it.

7. Secondary address synchronization
Another rather nice feature that Palm's programmers retained from Claris Organizer was support for a secondary address. The information from this field, along with the data from the Birthday, Web Site, and Comments fields, is transferred to the Note on the Palm handheld. These extra fields are shown in Figure C.

FIGURE C


The Macintosh Address Book sports a few extra fields. Roll over picture for a larger image.

There's one small catch. While the Birthday, Web Site, and Comments fields actually synchronize, the secondary address information is simply transferred from Palm Desktop to the Palm handheld.

So what's the problem, you might ask? Actually, there's a couple; one is that you cannot add a secondary address on your Palm handheld. It won't synchronize. But the more important issue is that if you aren't careful (or simply are not aware of the problem) you could lose all your secondary addresses after performing special HotSync operations.