As someone who has both an iPhone and an iMac, I’ve become quite a fan of Apple’s Address Book utility. I know it can keep track of birthdays too, but I don’t know if something’s broken or what, but I never get a “birthday” field to fill in. How do I enter a birthday into someone’s Address Book entry?
Turns out that there’s a secret key sequence you need to use. It’s up-down-left-shift-cmd-option-space. All at the same time. While entering a contact. Oh, and it has to be an odd-numbered day in an even numbered month.
Or am I just kidding? 🙂
Actually, adding birthdays into the Address Book is easier than what I outline above, which is just as well because I think you’d need at least three if not four hands to have enough fingers to push all those keys at the same time!
Let me demonstrate. Here I am in Address Book looking at my friend Cameron’s entry:
To edit his entry, I have to click on the tiny “Edit” button on the bottom edge (highlighted above). Clicking on that and every field suddenly shows up and can be added or deleted, as appropriate:
You’ll notice that there’s no “Birthday” field. That’s because you need to “insert” the field into the card form. That’s done by choosing “Insert…” from the “Card” menu:
Ah, now you know the secret technique! Once you insert the birthday field, it offers the opportunity to enter the actual date of their birth:
Don’t know the year? You can guess, or just set it to the current year and you’ll have a convenient way of keeping track of how many years you’ve known each other. 🙂
Oh, and here’s another cool thing: if you also use Apple’s iCal calendar, go into Preferences and look under “General”:
That’s right, if you include the poorly labeled “Birthdays calendar” it will actually use all the birthday fields entered into your Address Book to help you keep track of people’s birthdays!
You make it sound so simple. However, many folks have found that you can’t enter the full year, e.g., 1947. How come?