The PDA Guerilla: Finding lost files

Some months ago I wrote a blog about DataViz Technologies' Documents To Go, a Palm-based office suite that uses native Microsoft Office formats. I mostly use Word To Go, and I write many of my first drafts in it. It is slower to write in the Palm with a stylus rather than on the keyboard on my laptop, but that slows me down to a pace at which I put much more thought into what I am writing. The result is that my first drafts are consistently much higher quality that those I produce on the keyboard. Later I usually hot sync the draft over to my laptop for editing, but by then I am usually down to fixing details, which are easier to see on the laptop screen.

So I have several months of experience with Word To Go since writing that first review. One thing I noted in that piece was that I had had problems with previous versions losing documents. The documents were still in the PDA's memory -- I could see them in Filez, for instance. And the missing files turned up on my desktop after a hot sync. But often once I closed a file in my PDA, I could not get it to show up on the document list in Documents To Go and so could not reopen it. This was less than convenient and meant that I could not use Word To Go for notes, for instance, that I would want to close and then reopen later when I was writing a piece from them.

At the time I had not seen that problem in Version 10.000. Since then, however, this has become a growing problem that limited my use of what otherwise is an excellent application to doing first drafts of Computerworld columns that I typically write in one sitting. Earlier this week I wrote a blog about that problem.

DataViz is nothing if not responsive, however, and within a couple of hours I got an e-mail from Danny Tu at DataViz, who had read the blog and offered to help. Through the afternoon we exchanged e-mails, and he taught me a trick I had not discovered for myself that fixed the problem. So I had the original blog taken off the Computerworld site. For other users who may be seeing the same problem, here is what worked for me, along with another suggestion Danny gave me:

I had already tried doing multiple document searches, taking out my SD card so that I was only searching documents in main memory on the Palm, specifying only Word documents, searching the entire document menu and the subcategory where the document I wanted should be. None of that worked. What I had not tried, however, was the "toggle view" tool. This is the icon on the far right of the icon bar under the main document listing. It shows a folder with a magnifying glass. Clicking on that gets you to a tool that lets you see your documents list in finer granularity than the main view provides -- you can for instance look at documents only in main memory or only on a memory card. And it found my missing documents. I can open documents directly from this view, so it solved the problem.

If you are having a similar problem and this does not work for you, Danny suggests that you load the "DatavizTech.prc tool that you can find at C:\Program Files\Documents To Go. Once that is installed, open it, get the pull-down menu and select "advanced option, and under that "delete preferences". This deletes the Documents To Go preferences file. Once you have done that open Documents To Go and see if the missing documents have turned up.

If that doesn't work, e-mail DataViz. They do respond quickly.