How to Add Birthdays to iCal

Many of the included applications in Mac OS X are well integrated. You can create movies in iMovie, make a soundtrack for that movie in Garage Band and put them on a DVD with iDVD. The applications iCal and Address Book are no different in terms of how well they communicate. By adding birthdays to your contacts in Address Book and telling iCal to bring them in, you'll never have to remember another birthday again. Here is how to do it.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Apple Computer running Mac OS X
• A list of your family's and friends' birthdays

1. Open "Address Book."
2. Select a contact and click the "Edit" button just below that contact's information.
3. Click on "Card" from the top menu, go down to "Add Field" and select "Birthday."
4. Enter that contact's birthday in MM/DD/YYYY format. You can either type in the numbers or use the up and down arrow keys to change the date.
5. Repeat Steps 2 and 3 for each contact.
6. Open iCal when you're done adding birthdays for your contacts in Address Book.
7. Select "iCal" from the top menu and click on "Preferences."
8. Click the check box next to "Show Birthdays Calendar" in the "General" tab of the iCal Preferences window. This will bring all the birthdays you entered previously into Address Book. iCal will create a new "Subscriptions" area with the "Birthdays" group. All birthdays in iCal are highlighted with the color in the check box next to "Birthdays" and will automatically recur year after year.
9. Close the iCal Preferences window.
10. To check the birthdays in iCal, use the month arrows and flip through until you find a birthday. The birthday boy or girl's name appears on their birthday.

Tips & Warnings

• You can also add anniversary dates or other custom dates you need to remember by choosing "Add Field" and selecting "Date" from the "Card" menu. These, however, will not be added to your iCal calendar.