10.7: Cleaning up birthdays in iCal
Aug 22, '11 07:30:00AM
Contributed by: Challaud
Lion adds a little known feature in iCal, birthdays without birth year.
I've had a rather large Address Book contact list that over the years have been synced by multiple services and some of the birthdays show a wrong year. This hint shows how you can do a quick(er) clean up of your birthdays calendar.
Users of Filemaker's Bento know that beyond being a practical personal database it is also an awesome quick editor for Address Book. In Bento, all of your Address Book fields can be shown in a database/spreadsheet format and you can quickly filter and order your contacts based on the field.
- Launch Bento (even the trial version will work), lookup Address Book and enable the 'Birthday' field.
- The hint here is that all of the Birthdays without a year in iCal are actually dated the year '1604.' So browse at your leisure and by selecting the 'Birthdays' column you will be able to see the ones which show a wrong year and change it to '1604.'
- As a result your updated Birthdays will show no years in iCal.
There might be other, more elaborate, ways to do this but at least this could be done without fiddling with the system using Terminal or going through each contact one by one in Address Book.
[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one.]
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