Excel spreadsheet for birthday email reminders in Calendar

Question

Excel spreadsheet for birthday email reminders in Calendar

I have hundreds of birthdays in Calendar and I have it set up to email me an alert on the day. However, sometimes when Apple does a software update, it clobbers this. The birthdays are still there, but not the email reminders, or the email reminders don't work. For example, this last time, emails won't go out at 1am. So, I am having to redo all the birthdays as they come along. I think this is the third time in the last few years I've had to do this. So, what I'd like to do is put all the birthdays in an excel spreadsheet and have a program, Apple or otherwise, that emails me a reminder of each birthday on the day of the birthday. Surely someone else has already done this. I hope. I don't want to figure this out on my own if someone else has already done it. If it is you, please help. Thanks.

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

iMac (M3, 2023)

Posted on Jan 21, 2025 9:04 AM

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Answer 1

Jan 21, 2025 7:40 PM in response to W Stephen Wilson

Apple has a specific setup just for what you want:

Open the Contacts app, create or update a contact for each person, and complete the "birthday" field for each (Contacts User Guide for Mac - Apple Support)
Show contacts’ birthdays in Calendar on Mac - Apple Support
While still in the Calendars app Settings > Alerts > Birthdays > [select an option for reminders]

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Answer 2

Jan 22, 2025 4:35 PM in response to W Stephen Wilson

I forgot to ask who the account provider is where you actually store your calendar? For example, is your email hosted by Apple's iCloud, Google, Mircosoft, Yahoo, etc? To check, open Calendar, in "Settings ...", click Accounts at the top. What is listed in that list on the left?

If using an iCloud account to store you calendar information, then your email alert event settings (Set alerts for an event in Calendar on Mac - Apple Support) should never be lost. If using an iCloud account, email reminders should be very reliable.

If however, your calendar is hosted somewhere else, then there is always to chance for an incompatibility or unreliability between Apple Calendar and the way that the provider's server implements alerts settings.

If your calendar is not currently hosted on iCloud, someone here can then help you import your existing calendar events into an iCloud account. Honestly, any other method (such as an Excel file with scripting) is never going to be as reliable as iCloud calendar email alerts.

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Answer 3

Jan 22, 2025 2:08 PM in response to FishingAddict

My apologies for not being precise enough. They aren't really birthdays, just annual events I want reminders for. I don't really want to put my grandmother in my contacts so I can be reminded every year of her 1892 birthday. However, I thought I'd migrate a few over and ran into the problem that I had no option for the alert. In the alert settings there is no option for an email alert. Even if there were, I would not trust it. It is exactly those email alerts from calendar that Apple messes up with some updates. I'd like something independent, such as the suggested excel list of birthdays and a program that emails me a reminder for each date. I'm just hopeful, not optimistic. I'm sure that with enough effort, one could get "Automator", AppleScript, the underlying unix, or maybe ChatGPT, to do it. Looks like work in any case. Was hoping to avoid that. Thanks though.

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Answer 4

Zurarczurx

Level 4

1,299 points

Jan 22, 2025 3:22 PM in response to W Stephen Wilson

Look up Cron Jobs and crontab.

Cron jobs are tasks that run automatically in the background to a schedule.

Cron jobs can do stuff directly or can run scripts.

crontab is the app/utility that creates and manages cron jobs - it's run in Terminal.

I'm not an expert in cron jobs but with a bit of googling I set one up to print a test page every couple of days to stop my printer heads drying out. You could do some googling and work it out yourself or find someone who's already done it - or maybe someone else will be along here with a better idea.

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