I work in the Film/TV industry and use my 95LX primarily for it's Phone Book capabilities. As a Production/ Unit Manager, a phone number is a vital link to a person, product, or service that I often need quickly.
I have thousands of names, addresses, and other information to track, and have to divide up my phone books into two main categories: People/Crew and Service/Vendor. I have to further divide each of those categories up. For example, my People/Crew phone book files are:
CREW'A-F.PBK
CREW'G-L.PBK
CREW'M-R.PBK
CREW'S-Z.PBK.
I enter prefixes in front of names to further organize the phone books. For example, AC stands for "Assistant Camera", MC stands for "Makeup", DP stands for "Director of photography," etc. The Phone Book index screen looks something like this.
AC-Smith, Mark 213-456-7890
AC-White, Lois 415-543-2109
DP-Larue, Jill 708-876-5432
MC-Nye, Ben 213-987-1234
The 95LX sorts all entries alphabetically, so all the ACs are listed together, followed by the DPs, etc. In addition, I can do F5 (Goto) search on categories to find, for example, all my Directors of Photography.
I understand the new 100LX has a Category field in its Phone Book, to allow me to do this kind of search. I don't know the limitations of the 100LX, but I have yet to encounter a category coding problem on the 95LX. For those of us who still have the 95LX and have invested so much time and effort making it work for the task at hand, the mere thought of getting another unit and reprogramming it seems too daunting a prospect.
Fern Silvernagel Wallington, NJ
[The 95LX is a very robust Palmtop, fulfilling many users' needs. However, I found that transferring my 95LX .PBK file to the 100LX was relatively easy. Copy the .PBK file over to the 100LX, press (MENU) File Open, select the .PBK file and press (F10) (OK). The 100LX automatically translates the .PBK file into the 100LX's .PDB format and loads the file into Phone Book.
The information in the 95LX's Name field is placed in the 100LX's Name field. Phone field date is placed in Business Phone field, and Address information is placed in the Note field on the 100LX. At a later time you can cut and paste information from the Note field to any other Phone Book field you like. You can create a System macro to help you in this process.
You can even load the .PDB file into the Database application and modify the Phone Book database, adding and deleting unused fields, and changing the size of a field. Warning: Don't modify your 100LX Phone Book database until after you have translated all your PBK files. If you do, the files won't translate properly -Rich.]