But no product is a panacea. With continued use I found little idiosyncrasies. These weren't major problems, they were just little things I wished would work differently. One such thing is the Memo Pad. Don't get me wrong; I think the Palm Memo Pad application works fine. This complaint is on the Notes side. If you synchronize your Palm Memo Pad to the Notes Journal, you may have noticed the categories don't cross over. That's because the Journal entries lack a categorization feature. You're stuck with one big list of memos, sorted by either the title or the last-modified date. This can be a problem if you store lots of memos.

Luckily, it's not difficult to change the design of your Journal to accommodate categories. By following the instructions below, you can probably pull it off even if you've never done Notes development before. You will, however, need the Domino Designer client (what used to be called the full Notes client). Otherwise, you won't have the necessary tools to make the change. If you're in that boat, don't worry. Find someone in your organization that has the Designer client, like a developer or system administrator, and ask him or her to help you.

I'm assuming many things in this article:

• That you already have a PalmPilot, Palm III, one of the new Palm IIIx or Palm V devices, or a compatible "clone";
• That you have a conduit that lets you synchronize with Notes, like Pylon Conduit;
• That you already set up the conduit to synchronize the Palm Memo Pad with your Notes Journal.

In this article, we're going to focus on modifying the Notes Journal to make it work better with the Palm.

Remove the template link
Before getting started, you should delete the link between the Journal and its template. Templates are databases that can be used to spawn other databases. If the design of a template changes, the system administrator can have Notes automatically update all the databases that were created from that template. Since you're changing a database that was created from a template, you should first sever the link. Right-click on the Journal database icon and select Database Properties from the menu. Select the Design tab on the Database Properties dialog box. Finally, de-select the Inherit design from template property. Close the Database Properties dialog box. Now you can make changes to the database without worrying about the changes being overwritten by the template.