[ido]

can I highlight, cut and paste without the stylus, just using the d-pad?

[Kevin Michaels]

Hi there,

Kevin from Handspring here. It’s very easy to highlight, cut and paste without the stylus. Hit the Menu key to get to the Edit menu. From there, you can choose Cut, Copy, Paste, Select All, etc.

Hope that helps.

Best wishes,
Kevin

[kamalot]

I got that part. But how do I SELECT something wihtout using the stylus?

The Pictures program seems to allow using the Shift key to select multiple objects. Something I quickly became used to. Snapper Mail does not seem to do this, yet.

Is there a standard way of selecting text with the 5-way d-pad?

[mwomwom]

Contacts
======
Put highlight on the name not the number and press the center key to open the contact
To dial, press center while name is highlighted
To make a new contact, press left or right on any entry and the highlight moves to the New COntact button

Calendar
=======
Use up and down to scroll between events and times
Use right left to go from day to day

Here's the real trick though: Press center on a time to change it's highlight from dark to light blue. Light blue means I'm selected for action. You now see the hightlight is on the action buttons at the bottom. Details is the default choice. Press center to open the selected button.

ToDo
====
Use same center button to select and then left right to select action button and center again to take the action.

Memo
====
Option + up or down scolls by page
Center selects and opens memo.

[skydog]

umm...call me dense ("you're dense!"), but I still don't think the question has been answered. The way I understand it is like this: say you have a paragraph of text in a memo, and you want to select 5 words from the middle, cut them, and paste them at the end of the paragraph. With a stylus, this is easy - put the stylus down at the start of the first word, drag it to the end of the 5th word. Then execute the cut/paste using the menu or menu shortcuts.

But with the 5-way pad, is it possible to execute the drag-select part of this operation? On a PC, you would hold down the shift key while hitting the right arrow until the desired text was highlighted. Dunno if something similar is available on the T600.

Bonus points if there is a way to select forward/back by entire words rather than a character at a time (e.g., shift+ctrl+right arrow key in MS Word).

Anyone know?

thanks

[itsyvonne]

you're absolutely right--the orig. question has yet to be answered. You're definitely not dense, and thanks for taking the time to explain the issue so thoroughly! My suspicion is you can't do this, but I hope I'm wrong!

[cferd]

<umm...call me dense ("you're dense!"), but I still don't think the question has been answered>


If you're dense then so am I. I thought I got the question the first time and I'm looking for an answer myself, because I can't highlight without the stylus.

[norpah]

I just want to know how to select (or call it mark, or call it highlight) a piece of simple text on any line and then go to the edit menu to "cut," "copy" or "paste." This is the real question. I think we can all figure out how to execute the menu functions. Now, just give us "the rest of the story."

[mo-bile]

I don't know the answer to the question, but I will pass on a cool thing I discovered (it's probably in the manual tho)

If you hold down shift and press the backspace key, you will delete an entire word in one stroke instead of having to delete each individual letter.

[chiru]

I need this feature despo... Any hack writers or if any one can point me how to write a hack, I think I can try.

-chiru

[Kevin Michaels]

Hello again everybody,

Sorry I didn’t get this answered in my first posting. Although Handspring has made a lot of progress in minimizing the use of the stylus in the Treo 600, it has still not been completely eliminated. As discussed, you can use the Select All function to highlight an entire contact entry or email, but you’ll still need to use the stylus to choose portions of words, sentences, or numbers.

I hope that clears up any confusion.

Best wishes,
Kevin

[jjennings]

What an oversight by Handspring ! BlackBerry can do this no problemo.

[Guitar Dad]

To me, a stylus is like a mouse. When I use my PDA and keyboard, I can highlight text with the keys, but I find it easier to grab the stylus to do it, just lilke I do with a mouse. It's not a big deal, but if it can be done stylus-less with a BB, then there's no reason why we should not at lest have the option with the T600.

[Morbius]

And Kevin, this is one of the reasons so many people on this site keep asking about getting Graffiti input working.

What we're talking about with this example (hilighting text blocks, copying/cutting/pasting) requires the stylus, as you've said. But thanks to HS not including Graffiti input, that means we're doing whatever we need to do up to this point using the keyboard, then need to pull out and use the stylus for this action, and THEN put the stylus back and go back to using the keyboard to finish what we're doing, i.e. typing the replacement text. Many of us (most?) seem to think this is extremely annoying, and would prefer to be able to just enter the replacement text using Graffiti, once we already have the stylus out for the highlight operation. It's inefficient to keep pulling out and putting back the stylus, perhaps multiple times in a record, because you have to do part of the operation with the keyboard and part with the stylus. We want to be able to do it ALL with the stylus, if we so desire.

Couple this with there being no good keyboard method of using command-stroke shortcuts (like the stroke-C) or for entering shortcut text (little curly-Q and DS for datestamp) and not having Graffiti is a really let down for some of us. (and yes, somebody already pointed out how to use the keyboard for the curly-Q stroke, but that ends up taking almost as many total keystrokes to get the shortcut you want as it would to manually type the think completely!)

So can we ask you to carry back to HS a request from all of us to enable Graffiti input through an update, and soon?

[bmacfarland]

I don't think is an oversight or at least not a big one. There's only so much you can do on first release. Handspring clearly got a number of the 5 way stuff right.

I'd venture to say the Treo can do 80% of what most phones can do. So while we can complain that it doesn't do the last 20% (say bluetooth, or this select thing), why not ask why the bluetooth phones don't have a keyboard like the Treo or the Blackberry doesn't run my Palm OS applications like the Treo?

[jaginger]

Actually, I agree that this is a big oversight. I need to highlight stuff all the time, and hate pulling out the stylus to do so. On a keyboard, it's just hold down "shift" and then press the arrow keys. That would have been a piece of cake for HS to put in the new TREO (or even the old ones). Bummer that they didn't.

[skydog]

Yeah, I dunno, I guess it's not that big a deal to me. That's how it is on my T300 and I do just fine there. I thought maybe the D-pad would allow me to do this without the stylus, but honestly, it doesn't matter that much to me. I was just curious. Sounds like the D-pad is very useful in general, though, which is nice. Now if only my T600 would ship, I could find out for myself!

Hey Kev, if I slip you a $20, think you could walk down to the loading dock and "expedite" my shipment? OK, maybe a $20 for you and one for the guy at the dock. LOL.

[jjennings]

On my BlackBerry, I just hold in Shift and roll the track wheel over the text I want to copy (either frontwards or backwards), pust in the track wheel and select copy. Real simple. Real easy. Hopefully someone will come up with a similar utility?

Also, I am new to PALM. On Blackberry there was a program called AutoText that you could set up different things for. For instnace I can can type the letter "u", and it would replace it with "you". I can type in "h", and it would replace it with "Handspring." I can type in "sig", and it would replace it with my signature and contact info. Great app, and it worked in all programs. Anything like this we can use for the Treo.

[mabmarc]

I checked the manual and did a search on this site for this but couldn't find it. Anyway, how do you use the shortcuts under preferences on the Treo 600? Am I missing something? I would like to use DS to get the date stamp.

Kevin, maybe you know the answer to this question?

Thanks,
Marc

[chiru]

Originally posted by mabmarc
I checked the manual and did a search on this site for this but couldn't find it. Anyway, how do you use the shortcuts under preferences on the Treo 600? Am I missing something? I would like to use DS to get the date stamp.

Kevin, maybe you know the answer to this question?

Thanks,
Marc

Me too.. i too wanna know.

-chiru