Writing
Built-In Applications
First, consider the Memo Pad built-in application. A memo can be up to 4 kilobytes (4096 characters) long. That is about 600 words. While that may be enough for a junior high school book report, it is not enough for your magnum opus.
But what is it enough for? It certainly is enough for a paragraph or four. You could write groups of paragraphs each as a separate note. Stringing the paragraphs together in order is the next problem to face. Memo Pad allows you to put memos in order two ways: manually or alphabetically. You can manually order the memos, but that order could be accidentally destroyed. A better solution would be to give each memo a title so the memos sort into the appropriate order.
A two-digit chapter number, a period or space, and a three-digit paragraph number would work; and you could use the remainder of the first line as a short description. Inserting a group of paragraphs between two existing groups would be easy enough. Just give the new memo a number between the numbers of the two other memos, if you were foresighted to number groups with multiples of say, 5 or 10. If the two groups have adjacent numbers, use the number of the first group with a suffix: a, .5, or something else. Moving a group of paragraphs is also easy: just change their numbers.
The application you use does not need to be Memo Pad. To Do List items can have attached memos, which are independent of the Memo Pad memos. You can use a category in your To Do List to store a document broken up into chunks this way. Similarly, you can pick a date in the far future—say, 1 January 2030—and store chunks in memos attached to appointments on that date. You can even use the Address List this way.
While the 4-kilobyte limitation may appear to be inconvenient, you can instead make it work for you. Four kilobytes is a reasonable limit on the text of a web page, for example: each page is then two or three screens long. Storing the text of a web site in a series of memos both organizes the text and imposes a readability hint: hitting the 4 kilobyte limit is a signal the page should have less detail or fewer topics. Even when writing traditionally organized text, a 600-word boundary is a reasonable limit on a single unit of exposition, corresponding to a little over two manuscript pages: should a single expository unit reach this limit, you may want to give serious thought to sub-dividing the unit.
A major advantage of using the built-in applications in this way is that the text can be easily moved into a PC application, such as a word processor. The Palm Desktop can edit the records from any of the built-in applications, and the notes can be copied from the record and then pasted into the desired PC application.
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Copyright © 2002 Brian Hetrick
Page last updated 15 July 2003.
