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September 22, 2008 in Tips by Nick Sivridis
j-Note export utility
Being a Nokia/Symbian mobile user, I’m faced with some problems when it comes to task synchronization between my Outlook installation and mobile phone.
You can have your full task list into a Nokia phone as a long list, something really useless when you’re dealing with a 50+ item list. Of course contexts or tags are not supported and I had to think of a way to have my GTD system always with me bypassing Symbian’s difficulties and without using third party software which cannot synchronize tasks with Outlook.
And I came up with a small test project based on a really simple idea: Create a note in Outlook for each category with its own action list. Notes can easily be synched using the standard Nokia software (PC suite) and I ended up having a really small tag list making weekly reviews on-the-fly without problems.
The utility is written in VBscript and I’ve decided to embed it into an excel sheet application (standard .bas scripts need special handling) for easier execution. You need to enable macros for this to run, and of course the code is unlocked so you can view or change it.
- Select the task folder from which you want to get the tasks
- Select Tasks to a note to create a master-list note
- Select Categories to Notes to create/update a note for each category
- All notes will be created into your default Notes folder
- Note that categories are referring to Outlook standard categories and not in jello dashboard contexts. You can use j-note without having jello installed.
Download j-notes (alpha). Its in experimental stage so test it and share your feedback.
I hope It will help you with your Nokia and (why not?) other phone models as well.
update:
If you get a library error opening the application do the following:
- Press Alt+F11 (Tools>Macro>Visual Basic Editor)
- Into the VB editor go to Tools>References
- Into the references window find your Outlook library (Microsoft Outlook xx Object Library) select it and click OK
- Close the VB editor and save the j-note editor
- Restart the application
7 Comments to “j-Note export utility”
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September 24, 2008 at 9:07 am
Hello Nicolas,
Nice idea ! with my N95 8Go, I am very interested as well, since I get a flat list of +80 tasks.
I actually get a “compile error” that says “can’t find project or library” on the declaration “Public ol As New Outlook.Application”.
My config: Excel/Outlook 2003 US/english on XP SP2.
Just to let you know
Cheers
September 24, 2008 at 5:21 pm
@Jeff
This happens sometimes! I’ve updated the post with instructions on how to deal with it.
thanks for noticing!
September 25, 2008 at 9:50 pm
Thanks Nicolas !
I’m so stupid; basically I went in the VB reference and I saw you were pointing Outlook object library for… v12 ! and I’m on V11
I tested the script successfuly; I find back all my tasks as a notes, grouped by Project / context.
Great idea !
Thanks again for your creativity
Cheers !
Jeff
July 16, 2009 at 12:16 am
Thanks for sharing this – it has a lot of potential, but has not been in active development, obviously. I wonder if I’m doing something wrong because it misses a few categories to create notes from (Outlook 2003), and I haven’t been able to pin down the reason. Any ideas? If not, any alternatives? Thanks again!
July 17, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Yes, this was something of a little test for the specific functionality.
It wasn’t so popular since it was downloaded only 65 times, so it cannot be in active development.
Anyway thanks for testing.
July 2, 2010 at 6:49 am
Hi Nicolas,
How to make this utility work with Outlook Object v11?
July 9, 2010 at 10:22 pm
Doesn’t it? I think it should be supported. You just need to enable macros.