Getting Outlook contacts' birthdays on your calendar
This is kind of a bizarre tip (or at least a bizarre behavior of Outlook 2007). I don't normally post tips like this on my blog, but this one was interesting enough to me to post it.
Years ago I used to use a 3rd party app to automatically put my Outlook contacts' birthdays on my calendar. I think it was called Birthday Boy or something (I mainly wanted it so my contacts' birthdays would show up on my today screen on my PDA). I discovered a rather strange behavior of Outook 2007 that allows me to do this using only Outlook and Excel (I don't think this works in Outlook 2003, but it might, I haven't tried..)
The basic idea is this: you import contacts from Excel into your Outlook contacts. You then import them AGAIN into a temporary contacts folder. Then you drag them all from the temporary contacts folder into your regular contacts folder. Outlook will ask you if you want to add a new contact or update the information of the existing contact. Select Update... and then click the "Update All" button. Voila. For some reason this updating process causes Outlook to create a recurring calendar item for the contact's birthday, complete with your default reminder. Why it only does this when UPDATING the contact, and not when initially creating it on import I have no idea. I haven't played around with this a lot, but I think deleting the contact also deletes the recurring calendar item, although deleting multiple contacts at once didn't seem to delete the associated calendar items when I tried it. I'm also not sure what what happens when you change the birthday in Excel and reimport and update again - whether it updates the existing calendar item or creates a new one. You'll have to experiment.
Of course, you might already have all your contacts in Outlook and not in Excel, so you might not think this tip is that useful. Well, simply export your contacts from Outlook INTO Excel first and then start on the "import into a temporary contacts folder" step. Obviously you can do this for just selected contacts as well.
A couple of things to note: you may have to have your contacts inside a named range in Excel for this to work. I believe you also have to have the Excel doc closed when you import. This behavior may also be undesirable. You might not want all your contacts' birthdays on your calendar. If you need to delete all the appointments created, because you just don't want them there or need to start over for some reason, then first view your calendar by category (rather than the normal Day/Week/Month view), then use the field chooser (right click field headings), select "Date/Time" fields from the drop down, and drag the "Created" column to your field headers. Then sort by that field. All of the offending appointments should then be grouped together and easy to find and delete.
Which reminds me of another miscellaneous Outlook tip I use sometimes. I sometimes want to view my deleted items by date deleted. Use the field chooser in your deleted items folder and add the "Modified" column - assuming you haven't actually changed the deleted item since deleting it.
I haven't played around with this a lot, so if you have any additional tips, corrections, or clarifications, please comment!
Years ago I used to use a 3rd party app to automatically put my Outlook contacts' birthdays on my calendar. I think it was called Birthday Boy or something (I mainly wanted it so my contacts' birthdays would show up on my today screen on my PDA). I discovered a rather strange behavior of Outook 2007 that allows me to do this using only Outlook and Excel (I don't think this works in Outlook 2003, but it might, I haven't tried..)
The basic idea is this: you import contacts from Excel into your Outlook contacts. You then import them AGAIN into a temporary contacts folder. Then you drag them all from the temporary contacts folder into your regular contacts folder. Outlook will ask you if you want to add a new contact or update the information of the existing contact. Select Update... and then click the "Update All" button. Voila. For some reason this updating process causes Outlook to create a recurring calendar item for the contact's birthday, complete with your default reminder. Why it only does this when UPDATING the contact, and not when initially creating it on import I have no idea. I haven't played around with this a lot, but I think deleting the contact also deletes the recurring calendar item, although deleting multiple contacts at once didn't seem to delete the associated calendar items when I tried it. I'm also not sure what what happens when you change the birthday in Excel and reimport and update again - whether it updates the existing calendar item or creates a new one. You'll have to experiment.
Of course, you might already have all your contacts in Outlook and not in Excel, so you might not think this tip is that useful. Well, simply export your contacts from Outlook INTO Excel first and then start on the "import into a temporary contacts folder" step. Obviously you can do this for just selected contacts as well.
A couple of things to note: you may have to have your contacts inside a named range in Excel for this to work. I believe you also have to have the Excel doc closed when you import. This behavior may also be undesirable. You might not want all your contacts' birthdays on your calendar. If you need to delete all the appointments created, because you just don't want them there or need to start over for some reason, then first view your calendar by category (rather than the normal Day/Week/Month view), then use the field chooser (right click field headings), select "Date/Time" fields from the drop down, and drag the "Created" column to your field headers. Then sort by that field. All of the offending appointments should then be grouped together and easy to find and delete.
Which reminds me of another miscellaneous Outlook tip I use sometimes. I sometimes want to view my deleted items by date deleted. Use the field chooser in your deleted items folder and add the "Modified" column - assuming you haven't actually changed the deleted item since deleting it.
I haven't played around with this a lot, so if you have any additional tips, corrections, or clarifications, please comment!
posted by Josh at 9:46 PM
4 comments
