Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

how do you set up birthdays in addressbook

biohazard6969

biohazard6969

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 23, 2005
836
0
toronto canada
ok, so yea, theres this automator thing that says:

Find People with Birthdays
This action searches your Address Book for people with an upcoming birthday.

i looked in addressbook and there is no feild for birthdays....what is this supposed to mean?
 
Chose the card you want to add a birthday (or any other missing field) to. Go to the Card menu -> Add Field -> Birthday (or another field from the list).

Edit: Any added birthdays now also shows up in a Calendar in iCal without the need for any 3rd party scripts... ;)
 
Go to Address Book Preferences, Template and add the Birthday field to your vcard layout.

Then you can happily start adding birthdays. Once they're added, you can turn on the birthday menu in iCal or I guess set up an Automator action to mail yourself a reminder to buy em a gift. Or if you're cheap, set up an Automator action to email them on their birthday with a generic Happy Birthday card! :D
 
Use Entourage, you can't go wrong with the all in one app.

So annoying to open mail, ical and address book and pace through them all.
 
mad jew said:
:eek: I'll pretend I didn't hear that!
Click to expand...

me too. i just uninstalled powerpoint after getting keynote... entourage never even made it onto my system :p
 
this is a handy thread! i used to use birthdaycal to import them! i never even knew the birthday preference existed!

how is it now that we set notifications for the birthdays created by enabling the birthday preference?
 
_bnkr612 said:
Use Entourage, you can't go wrong with the all in one app.
Click to expand...
Except when it arbitrarily decides to disappear a bunch of your e-mail or to corrupt your entire database and destroy everything.

Entourage stores all events, contacts, and e-mail messages in one database. This database routinely grows to over one gigabyte on many peoples' computers. One glitch in this enormous, kludgy thing, and everything goes poof. Not to mention all the glitches in the software itself. I routinely have to tell people... "Well, it isn't supposed to work that way, but Microsoft decided to do it the retarded way, so... you're SOL."

The feature set of Entourage is great. The architecture is not worthy of a junior high school programming newbie. I would strongly recommend not using Entourage if you value your data.
 
i can't get myself to use an application if there is a standard apple equivalent, i've alwaysfound the the iapps and apple apps work much better because they come standard with the OS and the computer
 
That AddressBook birthday thing is cool and having add to iCal is cool, but then it's uneditable. You can't write a script to set alarms or notices for birthdays and it appears to be locked. I had written a script that sent me all the birthdays for a month and then sent a reminder a couple days before via email and then the day of sounded an alarm and notice. I was going to have it automated for all birthdays with a cron job, but it's locked.
 
Toe said:
Except when it arbitrarily decides to disappear a bunch of your e-mail or to corrupt your entire database and destroy everything.

Entourage stores all events, contacts, and e-mail messages in one database. This database routinely grows to over one gigabyte on many peoples' computers. One glitch in this enormous, kludgy thing, and everything goes poof. Not to mention all the glitches in the software itself. I routinely have to tell people... "Well, it isn't supposed to work that way, but Microsoft decided to do it the retarded way, so... you're SOL."

The feature set of Entourage is great. The architecture is not worthy of a junior high school programming newbie. I would strongly recommend not using Entourage if you value your data.
Click to expand...

I have a gmail account for mail, so it's backed up twice. But I am listening...

It's quite easy to convince me, but I have yet to have issues. Which version of Entourage did you have issues with?
 
_bnkr612 said:
It's quite easy to convince me, but I have yet to have issues. Which version of Entourage did you have issues with?
Click to expand...
I have used every version of Outlook Express and Entourage that has been available for the Mac, and they all have problems. With En'rage 2004, many old problems have been resolved or morphed into different problems, yet many remain, and new ones are always being added.

If you use POP: all of your messages are stored locally on your computer in one proprietary file. Microsoft has several ways to repair that file if something goes wrong, but those ways not only take forever, they also don't always work. So it is not difficult to lose all of your old e-mail, calendar events, and contacts. Even if you back up periodically, you still lose a lot.

If you use IMAP... man are you screwed. En'rage 2004 at least works fairly well, but it has the nasty little habit of destroying mail arbitrarily. Two cases come to mind... Sometimes about 50-150 messages will disappear from the Inbox for no good reason. No matter how much troubleshooting I do on this, I have not been able to pin it down. They just go away. This has happened to several users I have worked with. Another thing that's really fun... occasionally you'll send a message and it won't go to your Sent box... but it also doesn't stay in your Outbox. It just goes away. Poof. Usually it does get delivered, but your own copy is simply gone. And otherwise, it is a horrible IMAP client. If you try to move 500 messages from one folder to another, assuming it doesn't simply crash, the process will take several minutes. In any other IMAP client... about a second.

There's a lot more I can't stand about Entourage, but actually destroying e-mail has to be the worst.
 
_bnkr612 said:
Use Entourage, you can't go wrong with the all in one app.

So annoying to open mail, ical and address book and pace through them all.
Click to expand...
Couldn't disagree more. I much prefer to have a dedicated app with a smaller footprint to open when I need something then open an all in one app and then select what I am looking for. Plus I prefer the integration of Address Book, iCal, Mail, iChat, iSync, and other programs with each other to Entourage that integrates with itself and Office, but nothing else.
 
OK, you guys win. Giving mail 2.0 a run for a while. My biggest concern is losing valuable emails.

Thanks yall.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back