I had been having troubles with duplicated categories, so have been experimenting with by ToDo list. The following steps seem to duplicate the problem:
- Delete all Personal category entries from Entourage (i.e., clobber all the existing duplicates) so that there are no Personal categories listed. Entourage should create the category from the Palm category list on the next synchronization.
- Set the ToDo conduit to handheld overwrites Macintosh. Make sure at least one item in the ToDo list is in the Personal category.
- Set all other conduits for Entourage to Do nothing.
- Synchronize. The result should be a compete ToDo list in Entourage and a single Entourage Personal category.
- Make some change to the ToDo list, and set the conduit to synchronize.
- Synchronize again. The ToDo list should be updated, but the Entourage Categories list will now show two Personal categories.
What concerns me is that in the various discussions of this problem, posters who apparently are members of the Microsoft Entourage team have commented that there is a limit of 15 categories in the Palm. If they really believe this, then there seems to be a serious misunderstanding of Palm categories. As is clearly stated in the Palm documentation, each application supports up to fifteen categories. The Palm OS also supports up to 15 categories for applications. Thus, there may be considerably more than 15 categories in use in a single handheld device. The Palm desktop apparently merges the category lists so that categories with the same name in different applications are considered the same category. This is apparently not done in Entourage. I suspect the duplicate category list problem will show up anytime somebody has edited category lists such that the lists are different in different Palm applications.
Comments and corrections are of course welcome.
Eric Hildum
