Adding a note to an appointment

[Bagheera]

I'm trying to add a note to an appointment but it doesn't like me. I'm probably being really thick but I'm beginning to take this personally. :(

I tap on the appointment to open it, tap on Edit, then tap on the Notes tab. By default, the 'Pen' is highlighted, but writing on the screen yields nothing at all. If I tap on the 'Transcriber' icon in the bottom right hand corner, I can now write on the screen but, when I stop writing, instead of recognising the text, it just disappears altogether.

In Calendar view, the appointment is shown as having a Note attached, but I can't view the note in any way.

I have the same problem when I try to add a note to a contact.

Help tells me to tap on the contact or appointment then tap 'Tap here to enter notes' but I can't see this option anywhere on my screen.

Please can someone help me out? :?: :cry:

[Sven Johannsen]

Wish I could help, but it sounds like you are doing everything right. You might try de-selecting the pen as that puts it into ink mode rather than automatically recognizing text. I'm using Calligrapher but the basic concept should be the same. don't have the pen highlighted when I want to have my scrawls recognized.

Have you tried a soft reset BTW?

[Bagheera]

Thank you, Sven for your reply. Isn't it so nice that an idiot like me can ask a daft question of the whole world, and someone is nice enough to reply in order to help.

I tried a soft reset and it worked! The only problem was that the same problem recurred later on. A soft reset did the trick again but I guess I'd like to find a more long term solution if anyone knows one.

In the meantime, thank you. :)

[Andy Whiteford]

This sounds like an intermittent problem in which case it is most likely caused by some third party software. Do you have any other input methods iinstalled instead of the stock keyboard, transcriber etc?

[Bagheera]

Thanks for your reply. In answer to your question, no, I have no other software installed other than that which came with it three weeks ago. I haven't had time to explore that far yet!

[Andy Whiteford]

Okay, so you have not installed any software at all?
After a soft reset - you can add a note successfully to an appointment?
How long roughly before this problem appears after the soft reset?

[Bagheera]

Tried Sven's suggestion Friday evening when he posted it. Tried adding something to an appointment when inspiration hit about something on Sunday morning whilst in Waitrose (sad, but true), but it wouldn't work then. Reset solved the problem

Just tried again (Monday afternoon) and, yet again, had to do a soft reset. Just tried turning it off and on, took it off the cradle, put it back, re-synced, talked to it nicely etc etc and it's now doing something completely different...

Before, when I tapped the Notes tab, I got a plain screen and the text appeared in blue with automatic recognition. Now it's a lined screen (like I get if I go directly into Notes), handwriting is in black ink and it doesn't recognise the text until I ask it to. All of which is exactly what I was expecting when I first tried adding a Note to an appointment.

Spooky.

[Andy Whiteford]

Can I suggest you do a soft reset then only use the keyboard instead of Letter Recognizer or Transcriber. Try this for a few days and see how you get on. I realise you may not prefer this input method and its not a scientific test of sorts but it may help us to identify exactly what is happening here without seeing it first hand.

[Sven Johannsen]

The pen icon next to the cassete tape(for voice notes) does determine if you have a clean screen and auto recognize, or a lined screen and ink. The ink mode is there sort of emulating a real notepad, where you can draw pictures or whatever. If I recall correctly you can specify the color you want your ink to be. It does seem to recall the mode you were in when you closed the app and comes up that way the next time, i.e. pen highlighted or not.

Not that it matters all that much, but what type of PPC do you have?

If it is still doing strange things, could you re-iterate what it is doing, and if a soft reset fixes it again. Seems like the symptoms have changed a bit, and I've kind of lost what it is doing now. It shouldn't ever lose your input for you, unless it tried to recognize something and maybe couldn't. Usually you get some random garbage though if that was the case. This may just be a matter of getting used to what it does do with various combinations of the Notes pen icon mode and the Transcriber mode.

If it is really flaky then a Hard reset might be in order. If you haven't installed anything, beyond what gets sync'd, that won't be very painful. What it does is set it to fresh out of the box. Then you would try things without even syncing first to see if a pristene unit exhibits the issues. if it does, of course it needs to be replaced under warranty most likely. If not you'll know that something you added is a problem. That could be a corrupted calendar appointment or note, but that would be rare. We'll cross this bridge if we need to later though.

[Bagheera]

Thanks for the explanation about whether the recognition is on or off - makes sense.

Had a busy week so haven't had a chance to keep testing things. However, needed to make a note in a task tonight and, yes, it's not working again. When I tap on the Notes tab, I get a clear screen. When I write on the screen, the text appears in blue, but after I pause to let it recognise the text, it just disappears and I don't even get garbled text. If I close the item, whatever I have written is not saved. Soft reset continues to work but I'm sure this isn't right in the long term.

Do you think a hard reset is the next option, or a call to technical support and the warranty department?

[Sven Johannsen]

Do you think a hard reset is the next option, or a call to technical support and the warranty department?

Yea, that just doesn't sound right. I'll warn you that with an issue like this, the tech support guys will likely have you hard reset to see if that clears it up, before they would replace it anyway, so you might as well bite the bullet and do that. Haven't heard of it recently but do recall Techs having users press the magic sequence without telling them they are hard reseting, and about to lose all their data. That doesn't make for a good customer exerience.

Like I said, if you haven't loaded any apps, and are just syncing with Outllok and such, as long as Outlook is up to date, you won't lose anything but customizations, Time Zone, Location specific settings, etc.

If you do Hard reset, don't partner it though, before checking ou the ability to do notes, and seeing if the problem exists on a pristene device. If it is still there, then when you cal support, you can add that you have already down a hard reset and this is on a pristene device, not even partnered and that should speed up the conversation and canned troubleshooting steps they generally want to go through.

Good luck. What PPC is this BTW? If it's one of the new WM5 ones, maybe there is a problem that wasn't caught. Hard to imagine for this, but more obvious stuff has been missed.