Birthday format without year?

Question

Level 1

8 points

Birthday format without year?

I was updating my address book contacts just a couple days ago and was able to enter birthdays without the year (for people whose age I don't know or don't care about). But today I am entering more contacts and Address Book won't let me enter a birthdate without the year. It's a different entry format - forces me to enter numbers in a _/__/___ window. If I try to delete the year the entire entry disappears.
Any ideas on what might have changed? More importantly, how to I change it back to being able to just enter month and day?

17" intel iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Jan 28, 2009 5:21 AM

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Answer 1

Feb 25, 2009 8:54 AM in response to kdblair

This might be helpful: System Preferences | International | Formats | Dates (Customize) |

It seems this dictates how Address Book deals with dates. I stumbled across this as my problem was that AB insisted that I could NOT enter years for birthday entries. It did, for some reason, insert 2000 for every date.

After dinking around I figured out that I could drag the year (or any other components) and insert characters ie '/' into the work area that displays when you open customize. This can be done at the show 'short' format at least. I haven't tried any other options. No doubt this will spin into most or all places the date is input or displayed.

Hope this helps.

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Answer 2

Ashka

Level 4

3,891 points

Feb 3, 2009 10:56 PM in response to dogra

Looks as if the address book takes the date from the Medium format date in system prefs.
You can get away with typing in 0001 for a year though.
Feedback to Apple:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

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Answer 3

dogra

Level 1

0 points

Feb 3, 2009 9:22 PM in response to kdblair

Does anyone have an answer for this? I started to enter a large number of people into address book tonight, and I'm having the exact same problem, kdblair.

There is no "no year" choice in the birthday field's pick list for years.

There must be a way to do this.

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