Synchronizing iQue3600 Waypoints with Outlook Contact List

Synchronizing Garmin iQue3600 Waypoints
with Outlook Contact List

The Garmin iQue3600 combines PalmOS support for calendar, address list and other Palm-ish features along with a built-in GPS and excellent street-level mapping, automatic route finding and verbal navigational aids.

Using Garmin-supplied software (Intellisync), you can synchronize the iQue calendar, address book, etc., with the calendar, contact list and other corresponding data sets stored by Microsoft Outlook. As you start saving waypoints in the iQue, you find they are stored as address book entries. If you're like me, you just naturally assume that the latitude and longitude data from the iQue waypoints are incorporated into the Outlook contact list.

To paraphrase the late, great, Johnny Carson, "Wrong, GPS-breath!!"

Having lost a year's worth of waypoints due to a hard reset of my iQue 3600, I resolved to find a way to prevent that from happening again. Inquiries to Garmin tech support proved unenlightening, and there were only a few vague references to Custom fields in most of the places I looked on the web.

Enter Mobile Geographics. I found them through a web search, and one of their pages included some notes on the iQue data formats and storage. That, combined with some careful setup of Intellisync, allowed me to embed the waypoint data into an otherwise unused Outlook data field in its contact list.

The following procedure will set up Intellisync so the waypoint latitude and longitude are properly backed up:

	On your PC desktop, click on the "Intellisync Palm Configure" icon, bringing up this window. Make sure the line associating the Palm "Address Book" with MS Outlook is highlighted. In the lower right-hand corner, click on the "Configure" pulldown and select the "Advanced Settings" option.
	Next, click on the "Field Mapping" button in the lower right corner of the Advanced Settings window.
	Click "ok" to bring up the field mapping window.
	Scroll down until you find the "Other Address" field in the right-hand (Outlook) column. This will be the Outlook field you will associate with the latitude/longitude entry in the iQue "Palm handheld" column.
	Drag the "Other Address" until it lines up with the "Custom 4" line in the "Palm Handheld" column.
	Click on the center column between "Custom 4" and "Other Address" to map the Palm and MS Outlook fields. The double-headed arrow will appear to indicate that the fields are mapped.

After the next time that you perform a "HotSync" between your iQue3600 and Outlook databases, you can look at the entries in your Outlook "Contact List" that correspond to iQue waypoints. Open one of the Outlook "waypoint" contacts, click on the "All Fields" tab at the top of the window and select "Address Fields" in the "Select From" pulldown. The latitude/longitude data are now stored in the "Other Address" field. Data formats for this field are discussed in greater detail by Mobile Geographics, which is where I learned how to find the iQue field I needed to link to an Outlook field as described above.