[elgavo]

I have a Curve 8330 and have an issue with my BB truncating the Notes section of my Address Book and then altering the Notes section of my Outlook Contacts upon synchronization.

I use the Notes Section in my Outlook Contacts for my phone notes with customers (most recent conversations input at the top) and recently noticed whenever I sync my BB, it will actually delete the portion of my Contact Notes in Outlook that were truncated in the BB. I have already lost some of my notes in Outlook and don't want this to happen again.

I don't mind if the Address Book Notes section in my BB is not complete because of truncation, I just don't want my BB to DELETE the notes in my Outlook Contacts. I changed my sync settings to only be ONE-WAY from Outlook to the BB and hope this solves the issue but would like to know if anyone else has had this issue and found a proper solution.

For obvious reasons - like any changes I make to a Contact on my BB when on the road - this is not the most elegant way to handle this problem. However, I need to stop losing my notes of conversations with customers, regardless of how long ago the conversation took place.

Has anyone else run into this problem? Please respond with your suggestions.

Aloha.

[LinusMom]

Bumping this up because I'm having the same problem!

[jbrianmitchell]

I just had the exact same problem with a user of mine. No one has a reason this is happening? In ours, the truncating seems to take place at about 495 characters

[Reed McLay]

Members have reported similar issues while syncing calender items. When an item is purged on the device, it prompts for removal in Outlook too. When that happens, data is lost.

Outlook uses an auto Archive feature to backup older data.

[dheymann]

Has there been any resolution on this?

[Barry178]

As far as I can tell, this problem is still outstanding. And I've discovered it's worse than I originally thought. In some cases. the limit is under 4096 characters, even for notes.

[cfattovw]

i thought the pics were supposed to automatically change once your fb friend changes there fb profile pic. But mine didnt update and old pics were up. so i deleted all there pics on contacts thinking that the new pics would update. and now none of my contacts on my bb have pics. Any suggestions on how i can get the pics to update?

thanks in advance..

[iplayball]

You guys are right, the blackberry curve does a major truncation on the address book notes. I'm currently using a palm centro and am considering a blackberry. I heavily use outlook PIMs and frequently sync between pc and phone. At my work I have a spare curve that i mess around with. And when i synced my outlook 2007 contacts onto the curve i noticed that the notes for one of my contact entries was significantly truncated on the address book notes section of the blackberry. Now i did some tests trying to find possible reasons why this was happening. Was this the Blackberry Desktop Manager truncating the notes during the sync process? Or is it simply the blackberry device that's programmed to hold a certain number of characters. The answer i believe is BOTH. Not that it makes a difference because i could not come up with a fix for this. But this is what i found out:
When you sync via usb cable using the Blackberry Desktop Manager it retains about 1100 characters on the notes sections and it cuts the rest off. However, on a second test that I did, i used our Blackberry Enterprise Server and had it sync that outlook contact that i had with the extremely large notes section(around 13,000 characters). This time it retained about 4,076 characters. Almost 3,000 characters more compared to syncing via usb cable. Through multiple tests that i did when using a usb cable, i noticed it retains between 1,100 and 1,350 characters and truncates the rest. Well, i hope there's a fix for this. 13,000 characters seems like an overkill but I'd like to see 5,000 sync successfully via usb.

[glaves123]

I have the same issue....I think there should be a much larger character size limit. I use the notes section to keep track of all of my contacts for the hospitals I cover for work. Rather than create a new contact for every person I meet (nurses, doctors, anyone in the hospital), I create a contact titled for example "Huntington Hospital" and then record every person and their contact info in the notes section of the hospital. If I didnt do this, I would have anywhere from 50-250 additional contacts in my address book PER ACCOUNT (roughly 25 accounts; do the multiplication and that is a completely unmanageable amount of contacts). The reason this is important for me is I constantly update these contacts from my bb while in the hospitals, and I cant do this with a truncated section of notes. I'm not sure why this would be too difficult for blackberry to expand this other than take up a very small amount of memory space?

I haven't checked what happens when backing up through desktop in terms of losing data (sounds like this was checked in the above post) but I am on BES right now and the limit is somewhere around the aforementioned 4,200 character mark. It doesn't seem that I'm losing the info in outlook, it just truncates on the bb.

[engl]

Hi there, I'm having the same problem. Seems strange that blackberry won't allow unlimited characters for contact notes, considering communication with and management of contacts is what the BB is all about. Any news on a fix?

[classact]

I have had a similar version of this problem occurring for some time. If I have extensive text in the Notes section of any Outlook item and open it on the device and then Save it, any text in the Notes section beyond a certain (small) number of characters is lost -- truncated -- DELETED! And because it's always syncing, it's lost on the device AND on the server and on all desktop clients synced to it.

I spoke with Verizon about this and a tech found a KB article disclosing that it's a known issue that has yet to be fixed. Below is what she found and sent me, though it's not very informative.

We need to blast RIM with emails insisting they get this fixed. It's a known flaw that caused business data to be LOST -- DELETED -- by their software (without even so much as a warning).


______________

From Verizon tech I spoke with, here's what they found in a KB article about this:

Overview
When a calendar appointment is created on the BlackBerry smartphone, the first 4096 characters entered in the Notes field will be synchronized with the mail client. The Notes field is located at the bottom of the appointment screen.
In the mail client, there is no set limit to the number of characters that can be entered in the body of an appointment. In a mail client Calendar entry, up to 1897 characters will synchronize with the BlackBerry smartphone. If more than 1897 characters are entered, only the first 1500 characters will be synchronized.
Note: This limitation applies only if the language support used on the BlackBerry smartphone is not Unicode. If Unicode support is used, only the first 750 characters will be synchronized.
Upon receiving the synchronized calendar appointment on your BlackBerry smartphone, if you make changes to those 1500 characters, the appointment will synchronize with the mail client and the information in the original appointment will be overwritten. Any information that was not initially synchronized to your BlackBerry smartphone will be lost.

[Berriedup]

Had problems with Outlook Notes truncation on muliple pdas and platforms ever since the first PalmPilot. Over the years I've tried multiple third party alternatives. PhatNotes is good. But in the end I've caved in an keep my Outlook Notes small to be on the safe side. I would, however, still be interested in alternatives.

[iplayball]

ok guys i found something out that we can do to work around this. I tested this truncation out with the outlook notes section on TASKS and outlook NOTES. I copy and pasted 5,744 characters in the notes section of a task that i created. After syncing via BES(exchange server), only 4,063 characters showed up on the blackberry tasks notes section, about 1700 characters were truncated. The same exact amount of characters were truncated on my contact notes, very interesting. BUT, when i copied and pasted the 5,744 characters on outlook notes and had it synced, EVERYTHING showed up on the MEMOPAD app on the blackberry. So it seems like memopad has a higher limit on the amount of characters it can hold, where as contact notes and task notes are limited. So in short, if u have a large amount of notes that u want to put onto your blackberry contact notes, instead, put it on a outlook notes entry and then put a reference on the notes section of the contact saying something like "see memopad entry for more details"

Hope this helps.

[vapour_lock]

yea also encountered this, any one have success with this?

[iplayball]

hey dudes,

I think i found a solution for this contact notes truncation. The explanation below will tell u how to get around this using the blackberry app "google sync" and a gmail account.

1) First step is to get all your contacts onto gmail. If u don't want to mix your existing gmail contacts with your blackberry/outlook contacts then create a new gmail account

Now that you are ready to transfer your blackberry address book contacts, we will use google sync to wireless sync all your contacts onto gmail. Using your blackberry's browser download the "google sync app" (google it).
I could not post the link here because i didn't have enough crackberry posts.

2) Download and install it. Then configure it so that it's tied into your gmail account.

3) Change sync option to "manual" and go ahead and do a manual sync. This might take some time depending on how many contacts u have.

4) After it's finished syncing, log into your gmail account and make sure all your contacts are there to ensure everything is cool.

5) In your gmail account, go and find that contact(s) that you're having the note truncation issue. Add the rest of the note(the part that keeps getting cut off) from your outlook or wherever and save that gmail contact.

6) Go back onto your blackberry and do another manual sync

7) After the sync finishes, go into your blackberry contacts, can u now see your entire contact note? You should. U can go ahead and delete your gmail contacts(if u don't trust google). Just make sure u don't do another sync if u do delete your contacts from gmail or just delete the google sync app if this is a one time thing.


hope this helps guys.

[T�nis]

... Rather than create a new contact for every person I meet (nurses, doctors, anyone in the hospital), I create a contact titled for example "Huntington Hospital" and then record every person and their contact info in the notes section of the hospital. If I didnt do this, I would have anywhere from 50-250 additional contacts in my address book PER ACCOUNT (roughly 25 accounts; do the multiplication and that is a completely unmanageable amount of contacts).

Why would it be unmanageable? I used to worry about the address book becoming too full until I realized how good BlackBerry's search feature is. Now I just save any number I ever call if there's any chance I'll ever have to call the number again. I don't ever want to spend another moment of my life looking up some telephone number I've already looked up once. I've made categories and have a bunch of filters set up for each type of contact. So, why not just enter every contact separately and make a filter for each hospital? You could even make filters within filters, for example doctors, nurses, etc. Then your notes sections could be freed up for other notes, and it would solve this truncation/deletion problem. I use my contact notes sections to explain what the various numbers like "work 2" and "other" are for, and I make use of the notes feature of the call log for in-call notes. I find that that's a handy feature, too, because I can email the call history notes to myself. Then again, I'm not sure if there's a limit to the amount of contacts that can be entered ...

[Pre da Vinci]

It seems to me that there's only two ways to get "all your text" from your notes that exceed RIMs character limit onto your BlackBerry. You'll either cut and paste them into a file(s) which you then load onto your SD card (.doc, .rtf, .txt) or manually copy/paste them into the MemoPad ASCII csv text file you export from BB DTM then reimport. (I believe MemoPad is free from the char. limit)

I'd prefer to create files, (no char. limit) so now I'm wondering if anyone knows of an app for BlackBerry that can do a search for text within a file on a SD Card (.doc, .rtf etc...). I want to be able to find all my files that contain "X" word or phrase, like you can with BB OS "Search" for text within the organizer DBases.

Is this too much to ask? I can't find a global search app anywhere...

Thanks

[mr_efficiency]

hi iplayball, thanks for pointing out that Memopad has longer character limit than BB contacts notes. But I have 500+ long entries, so creating a corresponding # of Memopad entries is not worth it.. and they're not automatically linked. (Saw the google synch solution too - great idea thanks; not suitable for me.) Cheers

[mr_efficiency]

All, I've had this problem for years.
I think the notes field limit is not constant; from my observation sometimes it depends on the # of characters in the WHOLE contact entry (ie including job title etc etc).

What I do is
a) have created a macro in Outlook to measure the length of the currently displayed contact's note's field.
b) when Mr ABC XYZ's entry exceeds ~3900char then I create a 2nd entry titled ABC XYZ2 and continue to populate the Notes field there.
c) Requires a bit of manual checking... for which I export contacts. But only the first 256(?) char of the Notes field trf to Excel, so I have to manually check in Outlook ALL those that are hitting 256 char.

Alternative to (c) --> in another forum user hyedipin posted the following [presumably doing all this in Outlook without exporting]:
"I found a way to filter all contacts with notes in them, and then I added notes to the field columns and I stretched to column so I can easily see which ones had more than just a few lines of notes. I trimmed them manually and then I exported my old contacts and imported into Exchange contacts."

Any better solutions much appreciated. Thanks!

[mr_efficiency]

Just discovered that BB Desktop Manager cuts off the Notes entry (when writing to Blackberry) if there is a 'RIGHT double quotation mark' in the text of the Notes field. It handles a 'neutral double quotation mark' ok tho.

Some entries have thus been cut from 4500 characters to just 200 characters! Any tips (on fixing the BBerry problem) or on mass replacing within Outlook are much appreciated. Thanks.