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 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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