Sync Palm Zire31 to Outlook

I recently had a wonderful brainstorm confused for my wife. She uses a Palm Zire31 daily for business purposes. We have been syncing it to the Palm Desktop application. My wonderful brainstorm was to sync it to MS Outlook so that we could have the calendar and contacts in a more generic format to use with other applications. To date, we have not used Outlook for anything. As a matter of fact, I have NO experience with Outlook. We use gmail and hotmail on the web and have not (intentionally) used Outlook to read and send mail and are not wanting to start now. The version of MS Office we use is MS Office 97. When I click to open Outlook, I get a message box with the following message:

I do not want to use any of the mail functions. I do, however, want to use the calendar, contacts and some of the other functions of Outlook. What does that message mean and what, if anything, do I need to do to use Outlook without setting it up for use with e-mail? Do I need to set up user accounts on Outlook? If so, how? The Zire31 CD installation allows the PDA to be set up to sync to Outlook, but I guess it is assuming Outlook is already set up and being used?

 

Using Outlook without e-mail

Let me simplify the biggest part of my question. Can Outlook 97 be used without being set up for sending/receiving e-mail? Is there any special set up needed to do so? If so, what do I do about this:

from my original post???

 

If you've never used outlook, you might be able to open it by going to start->run and typing "outlook /cleanpst" (no quotes). Also, if you've never opened outlook, open it once, just don't set up any email accounts. It needs to open once to create a PST file to store contact and calender info.

Outlook 97 is pretty old; I am not sure if it will work with your syncing software. But you should certainly be able to enter contact data without setting up a mail account.

 

After going to start->run and typing "outlook /cleanpst" (no quotes), I get another message. See image.

 

Gecks probably knows more about this (Outlook) than me, but take a look at the link below and see if it helps.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/175296

Steve