2. Mass deletion capabilities of third-party PIM applications
Several Windows Mobile users use third-party PIM applications like
Pocket Informant / Agenda Fusion on the Pocket PC and
Pocket Informant / Agenda One / Papyrus on the MS Smartphone, let’s take a look at how these apps handle mass deletion. Note that you will NOT want to use these, in most cases, pretty bloated (albeit VERY useful and capable) apps if you "only" want to delete your PIM stuff –
SKTools or, even better,
PIM Backup is far better suited for "simple" PIM data cleanup.
2.1 Pocket PC
2.1.1 Pocket Informant 8.02
Contacts (and tasks - but, again, you can do the same in the default Tasks application of Windows Mobile Pocket PC!) can be easily mass-deleted after selecting them all (or a block of them) with the stylus:
While, in the default calendar view, it can’t delete more than one appointment at a time, you can easily do this in the powerful Search View. (Also see page 54 (
Search View (SV)) in the PDF manual
HERE). It’s really powerful and customizable; note that you can search for an empty string (or, an asterisk (*)) if you want to list everything:
Note that the above screenshot shows
all kinds of PIM data, not only Calendar. Should you want to stick to Calendar data
only, make sure you untick the Tasks etc. icons in the upper toolbar before (re-)running the wildcard search; then, only the Calendar items will be listed, ready for mass-selection with the stylus (or, if you want to quickly select everything, Ctl-A on the on-screen keyboard):
2.1.2 Agenda Fusion 8.60
In
Agenda Fusion, you can mass-select Contacts and delete them in one step:
You can’t, however, do the same to appointments or tasks; they need to be deleted one-by-one:
(Of course, as the operating system supports mass-deleting Tasks, the latter isn't really a problem - always use the built-in Tasks in Windows Mobile to delete these tasks.)
2.2 MS Smartphone
Unfortunately, the situation (compared to that of the Pocket PC) is much worse with the MS Smartphone platform: the three leading PIM suites,
Pocket Informant, Agenda One and
Papyrus, don’t offer mass selection / deletion capabilities at all or don’t really support mass-selection using built-in dialpads / keyboards. The "
Select All" hack of
AEBPlus, explained in my previous,
mail deletion article doesn’t work with any of them, either.
2.2.1 Pocket Informant 8.02
As with the PPC version, you’ll need to go to the Search View so that you can mass-select any kind of PIM info:
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way on my
HTC Vox (s710) to highlight more than one element in the list when only using the built-in dialpad or the QWERTY thumbboard (again, Shift did not work as expected – this, however, doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t work with
Motorola / Samsung Smartphones, though). However, with an external keyboard (tested with Pocket Controller; should also work with BT keyboards like the
iGo StowAway one), it does work as can be seen in here:
(in here, I’ve mass-selected four items)
Unfortunately, my (multiple – deleting both tasks and appointments) deletion attempts resulted in a crash:
I'm pretty sure the developer will fix the latter bug and adds mass selection capabilities using the numeric dialpad - together with, say, #, as is the case with Symbian S60 smart phones without a dedicated Pencil key.
2.2.2 Agenda One 8309
The (pretty extensive)
Options doesn’t offer this either:
(The situation is the same with the Tasks / Calendar view.)
Shift + cursor doesn’t work with external keyboards, unlike in Pocket Informant.
2.2.3 Papyrus 1.3.17
I didn’t find a way to mass-delete appointments or tasks (the app doesn’t handle contacts at all). You can only delete them one by one by selecting it and, then, selecting Delete. Shift + cursor mass selection doesn’t work (unlike in Pocket Informant) with an external keyboard either.
