Enable and disable birthday / anniversary notifications in Outlook calendar

In this tutorial, we will introduce the methods to add or remove birthday or anniversary reminders in Outlook. Please refer to the part you are interested.

Add a birthday or anniversary to your contact to enable notifications in Outlook

Set the reminder time in Outlook calendar

Disable birthday /anniversary notifications in Outlook calendar

Enable or disable birthday notifications in Outlook with two clicks

Add a birthday or anniversary to your contact to enable notifications in Outlook

Sometimes, you may find it’s annoying that you forget your friends or family members’ birthday. And it can be very awkward if you forget an important anniversary. Well, if you are an Outlook user, here we will show you how to add a birthday or anniversary reminder which would send you notifications according to the reminder time you set.

By default, the birthday and anniversary reminders are added to your calendar once the information is included in your contacts in Outlook. If you didn’t fill out the birthday or anniversary, go and do as follows:

1. Under Home tab, click Address Book in the Find group.
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2. In the Address Book: Contacts dialog box, double-click the contact that you want to add a birthday or anniversary to.
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Or you can shift to the Contacts view to open a contact directly.

3. In the opened Contact window, click Details in the group Show.
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4. Now you can add a birthday or anniversary in the corresponding box.
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5. Click Save & Close in the Actions group, a birthday or anniversary reminder will be added as an all-day annually recurring event.

Set the reminder time in Outlook calendar

By default, the Outlook reminders are set for 15 minutes before the event starts. If you want to receive the birthday or anniversary notifications further in advance for all the new contacts you are going to create, you can change the default reminder time here:

1. Go to File >>> Options >>> Calendar >>> Calendar options.
2. Set the time on the drop-down list next to the Default reminders.

Note: This change will be applied to all the events you create in the future.

Or, if you want to set the reminder time of some existing birthdays or anniversaries, please do as follows:

1. Go to Calendar, under the View tab, click Change View in the Current View group, then select List.
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2. Double-click the event that you want to change its reminder time.
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3. In the pop-up Recurring Event window, find the Options group under the Recurring Event tab.

4. Set the reminder time on the drop-down list of Reminder. You can set the time for up to two weeks in advance of the event.
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5. Click Save & Close in the Actions group.

Disable birthday /anniversary notifications in Outlook calendar

Well, although the reminder can be a good tool to prevent you from forgetting things, you can find it disturbing your life sometimes if there are too many of them, especially the unnecessary ones. To remove the birthday or anniversary reminders in bulk, please do as follows:

1. Go to Calendar, under the View tab, click Change View in the Current View group, then select List.
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2. Now click View Settings next to the Change View.
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3. In the Advanced View Settings: List dialog box, click the Filter button. In the pop-up Filter dialog box, type “birthday” or “anniversary” in the Search for the word(s) box, click OK. (Here we will type “birthday” as an example.)
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4. When it returns to the Advanced View Settings: List dialog box, click the Group By... button. In the pop-up Group By dialog box, select Reminder on the drop-down list as shown below, and then click OK.
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5. Click OK to save the view settings. Now you will see the contacts list is divided into two reminder groups: Has Reminder: N item(s) and No Reminder: N item(s), as shown below.
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If all of your birthday reminders are enabled, your contacts list will only have one group like this:

>>>

In this case, you can double-click any contacts to open the Recurring Event window, and select None on the Reminder drop-down list in the Options group. Now you will see both groups, Has Reminder: N item(s) and No Reminder: N item(s), in the list.

6. Now you can hold the Ctrl key to select the ones with reminders that you want to disable in the Has Reminder: N item(s) group, then drag them to the No Reminder: N item(s) group. (If you accidently move a contact to the No Reminder: N item(s) group, you can do it the other way around.)

Of coure if you want to remove all the birthday reminders, you can select and drag them all to the No Reminder: N item(s) group.

Note: If you only want to disable one birthday or anniversary reminder, please follow the steps listed in Set the reminder time in Outlook calendar, except that you need to select None on the drop-down list of Reminder in the 4th step.

Enable or disable birthday notifications in Outlook with two clicks

If you have our professional add-in Kutools for Outlook installed, you can enable or disable all your birthday reminders with just two clicks. If not, click here to download for a 60-day free trial.

To remove all the birthday reminders:

Under the Kutools tab, find the Calendar group, click Birthday, select Remove Birthday Reminders on the drop-down list.
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Now you will see all the birthday reminders are removed successfully.
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To enable all the birthday reminders:

Under the Kutools tab, find the Calendar group, click Birthday, select Restore Birthday Reminders on the drop-down list.
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