exporting

A couple of weeks ago, I described how to sync contacts between Outlook, Gmail, and your iPhone. The program missing from this contacts mega-merge was Thunderbird (download for Windows | Mac), and for good reason. Mozilla's free e-mail program is not particularly contact-friendly.

The first time I attempted to use Mozilla Thunderbird's import function to bring my Gmail contacts into the client e-mail application, I was seriously disappointed with the results. Most of the contact information was squished into a single nondescript field for each record. The few fields that did make the conversion were incomplete. The entire process was pretty worthless, overall.

Then I found the free Zindus add-on for Thunderbird. The program brings a subset of contact fields from Google and Zimbra into Mozilla's free e-mail program. For Google, the fields imported include the contact's name, primary and secondary e-mail addresses, phone numbers, IM names, company, title, and notes. (I didn't test the program with Zimbra.)

After you download and install Zindus, a "Zindus" option is added to Thunderbird's Tools menu. Clicking it opens the Zindus Configuration Settings dialog box where you're presented with a handful of contact-sync options, including a Sync Now button.

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OrgScheduler is an attractive and intuitive schedule management program that is a pleasure to use. Although it is not crammed with extra features, it does the basics very well and has a few cool extras to boot.

We loved that OrgScheduler's interface is so clean and intuitive, yet offers users plenty of options. The options for viewing the calendar alone are impressive, with vertical and horizontal views, daily calendars with increments as small as 5 minutes, quarterly and annual views, and quite a few others. However you like to look at your calendar, OrgScheduler can accommodate you, and will … Read more

If you read about my disappointment with the Pre's bluetooth capabilities, or lack thereof, then you'll know I've been frustrated with my contacts being on my Instinct and not my Pre.

Yesterday I did some looking around, (again) but couldn't find any cut and dry solutions. I figured tho, with both devices being smart phones I ought to be able to export from one and transfer to the other. Some how.

Here's what ended up working. … Read more

PDF-XChange Viewer presents users with an alternative to Adobe's Acrobat Reader. With some interesting additions, it's not hard to see this reader gaining some fans over its more popular competition.

The program's interface looks and feels remarkably like Acrobat Reader, but with more command icons along the top. Users who are familiar with viewing PDFs will find this fairly intuitive, but newcomers are advised to experiment with the options and pay attention to the Help file. Viewing PDFs is incredibly simple and should not be a problem for users. The documents look good through the reader and … Read more

People sometimes criticize Apple's iTunes software for looking too much like a spreadsheet--but for some people, it's not spreadsheet enough. If you're the kind of data-devouring music nerd who dreams of spinning your iTunes library database into a killer Microsoft Excel pie chart, then you have come to the right place.

In the following video and slideshow tutorial, I'll show you how to break your library data out of iTunes as a tab-separated list, PDF file, or Web database.

Amazon Web Services has unveiled a new service that lets users physically ship their data on drives, to be uploaded to the company's cloud-based S3 storage facilities.

AWS Import/Export, currently in beta, was announced on Thursday. In an Amazon Web Services (AWS) blog post, the team noted that "hard drives are getting bigger more rapidly than Internet connections are getting faster," and said a service such as Import/Export had been frequently requested by customers who wanted their data to be remotely hosted, but who had storage requirements at the terabyte and petabyte level.

"It … Read more

For most people, browsing is an either-or proposition: they use either Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Mozilla's Firefox. But I'm betting there's a bunch of people like me who find themselves spending time in both browsers, often simultaneously.

The problem is, my list of Firefox bookmarks bears no resemblance to my collection of IE favorites. It took all of about five minutes to solve this problem.

Move your IE favorites to Firefox Open Firefox 3 and click File > Import to start the Import Wizard. Choose Microsoft Internet Explorer and click Next. Uncheck all the options except … Read more

I spend most of my workday Alt-Tabbing between my Gmail inbox and the Outlook account on my employer's Exchange Server. The problem is, when it comes to contacts, there isn't much overlap between the two: Only a handful of Gmail addresses are also in the Outlook contacts list, and vice-versa.

Rectifying the situation takes only a few minutes. Start by moving your Outlook contacts to Gmail. In Outlook 2003 and 2007, click File > Import and Export, select "Export to a file," click Next, choose either comma-separated value option, and click Next again. Browse to and … Read more

WASHINGTON--The Bush administration sought to deflect criticism Wednesday over a new policy that clears hurdles for certain companies in China to receive exports of American-made multigigaflop computers, lasers, and other "sensitive" technologies with potential military uses.

Under rules that took effect last summer, some companies in China are--or will be--permitted to bypass normal legal procedures for receiving exports of certain restricted hardware and software from the United States. That list includes certain chemicals that could be used to build weapons, telecommunications equipment designed to operate at very high and very low temperatures, and computers with processor performance speeds &… Read more