Has anyone any suggestions of alternatives to a Palm organiser with Ultrasoft Money? It works perfectly when it works. A real gem, and an asset in itself. But if you have a glitch with your PC, or there is something funny about the PDA, then the whole thing unravels and its very hard if not impossible to recover without writing off everything that has gone before as an archive and starting a new Money file afresh. Are other options more robust? What the other options?
I have Ultrasoft Money for a couple of years and never had any problems with it. I have noted that some people did have problems when they moved to newer versions of Money and stayed on the old version of the palm software. But if you get the latest version, its all singing and dancing.
If you want to swap, it would probably mean a move to Quicken. The more advvanced (bigger features, bigger cost) versions have Palm and PocketPC installable components.
Its when you might, for instance, reformat and reinstall everything on your PC, or the Palm somehow gets corrupted that problems arise. The hidden intermediate sync files get messed up and ultrasoft isn't sufficiently refined to rebuild them reliably.
In the past I've lost records from the Palm and, this time, I've now got my Money file riddled with duplicate records! I emailed Ultrasoft when it happened once before and the reply was something like think yourself lucky to have this software available for your convenience ... we can't be responsible for when things go wrong.
I've now either got to spend ages weeding out all the duplicate records in Money (is there an easy way to do this by some kind of macro or else exporting them all to Excel or Access to filter them and then import back again?) or else abandon that Money file and start records afresh as of today, which defeats the object of having computer-based record keeping.
As for alternatives, I was thinking of what's available for Pocket PCs as regards synching with MS Money rather than an alternative to Money? I think I'm finished with Palms as they tend to be unreliable in themselves, screen freezes and digitiser drift being the problems that make me despair.>
There's an option in its conduit settings to "Reset intermediate database" and sync with "Desktop overwrites handheld" to re-establish the synchronization partnership.
It sounds like you used "recovery mode" which will upload "orphaned" records without requiring the synchronization partnership. IIRC, when you select this option, it squalks about making sure you back up your database first. If you don't like the results, revert to your backed-up database.
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