Apple Calendar creates a separate calendar for birthdays that are entered in Contacts. I like it because it adds a calculation to tell you the person’s age, as in “Joe’s 60th Birthday.” This is helpful when wishing someone a happy birthday.
However, this info does not show up in the main calendar feed. The birthday calendar doesn’t have its own feed, so it can’t be merged.
Is there any way to copy the birthdays over to the main calendar? I mean I can do it one at a time, but I’d rather not.
Bonus points if you know how to do the ‘nth birthday’ part in a regular calendar entry…
This isn’t going to directly answer your question. I use Cardhop for contacts and there is a birthdays section which calculates the age and then I can easily message or call the person from there. I prefer this because I want to reach out to the person on their birthday. I wish it would show recent birthdays that have passed in case I missed it.
FYI birthdays show in Google Calendar automatically, imported from Google Contacts data, and it can be turned off too. Surprising Apple doesn’t offer the same.
I use Google Calendar but not Google Contacts. For people close to me I simply make a yearly day-long even in my personal calendar for individual birthdays, with additional alarms x days in advance to remind me in case I forgot to shop for a gift.
For anyone else whose birthday I know I rely on Cardhop to send me an iPhone alert on the birthday.
My guess is there is no easy way to accomplish this. There are paid apps that will allow you to create a csv file from your address book which would give you a list to work with, but you will still need to manually create a repeating calendar entry.
When I create repeating entries for special occasions I add a 2 digit year. (Jill’s first solo - 97)
To be more accurate, unlike most of the other calendars, it does not have a separate feed. So I can’t access it using webcal, unlike most other calendars. And I can’t merge it with a calendar that already has a webcal address…
