How to: Show Birthdays on Calendar as Tasks

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username
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How to: Show Birthdays on Calendar as Tasks

Post by username »

Hi,

Unhappy with the fact that birthdays already recorded (in personal contacts, Outlook, Access and wherever) had to be inserted again to show up in the schedule, I created a small Excel VBA procedure that generates an .ics file that can be imported into the schedule/planner as iCal file.

What I did was I created 2 different day-events under category Birthday.
Next I exported 'all' the Birthday-entries (all 2 of them)
into the ical-format file

That showed me the syntax of the ical-format.

Next I created an Excel worksheet with 2 columns: Name and Birthday

From all the names and corresponding birthdays that I put into the 2-column Excel-worksheet I created the ics file and imported that .ics-file into the schedule as 'iCal' format.

Now my schedule has all the birthdays in it.
They show an asterisk, the name, and the age the person reaches when it's his birthday.

Example:

Name Birthay Schedule-entry (with YearOfAge reached this birthday)
John 1-1-1980 * John (26) [showing on Jan 1st]
Neil 2-2-1956 * Neil (50) [showing on Feb 2nd]


With many birthdays of family, friends, co-workers, etc. mixed you could add one extra column in Excel (with -for example- an indication what type of birthday it is) make some changes in the Visual Basic routine and thus change the resulting .ics file accordingly.
(eg: assign another birthday category with another color or replace the asterisk in front of the name with something else).

Have a look at the code it isn't that complicated ... ;-)

You can download the file - it is in plain text - and copy that into your Excel VBA editor.
The file has comments to further clarify settings.

It was written for Excel'97 but is pretty straightforward and should work in other versions as well.

One remark: in the Procedure you specify for which year you want the Birthday iCal file to be generated - currently set to 2006. When you want to generate the file for 2007 you need to adjust that .
This setting of year is also used to calculte the YearOfAge a person reaches this year.


Here it is:
http://www.mirageinformation.nl/files/B ... hedule.txt

Good luck,

Willem Pauw
Netherlands
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Post by Max »

Thank you, Willem!

Actually you might want to make a separate topic on your script in this forum and we will make it hang on the top for a while.
Maxim,
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Re: How to: Show Birthdays on Calendar as Tasks

Post by GKDantas »

Hey Max, this could be a feature request for a next version... birthday auto insiert in the schedule.
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Re: How to: Show Birthdays on Calendar as Tasks

Post by Max »

GKDantas wrote:Hey Max, this could be a feature request for a next version... birthday auto insiert in the schedule.
Birthday gets inserted as Task as well since long time ago.
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Re: How to: Show Birthdays on Calendar as Tasks

Post by GKDantas »

My fault Max, I added some contacts and could find the birthday there... but now I saw them. :roll:
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