One of my Excel School students, Rajatha, e-mailed me and asked,
I have to come up with a Birthday and Anniversary calender which would automatically send emails on the particular date, is this possible if yes then how?
My initial response was,
You can do the automated birthday / anniversary reminder using excel. Here is the basic approach:
- Record birthdays and anniversaries in a table
- Now, write a simple macro to scan the list to see which birthdays / anniversaries are on today
- For each of the matches, send an email with a pre-composed message (more on sending emails thru vba here: http://www.rondebruin.nl/sendmail.htm )
To which she came back and said,
I am not familiar with macros… is there any other way?
Well, there is.
You can use Excel to remind you about upcoming birthdays and create pre-composed messages, like above. The basic approach is like this:
- We list all the birthdays, corresponding names and email addresses in a list.
- Now, using TODAY() and IF() formulas we test if anyone’s birthday is today.
- If that is the case, we use Excel’s HYPERLINK() formula to generate a mailto hyperlink.
- Once you click on that, Excel opens your mail application (outlook or notes or whatever fancy app you are using) and loads the message.
- You just press the send button. Done!
Watch Excel Birthday Reminder – Recipe Video
Download Excel Birthday Reminder Template
Click here to download the excel birthday reminder template & play with it.
Do you use excel to keep track of birthdays etc?
Not me. I have very few close friends and I remember their birthdays. For the rest, I use facebook to get notified when their birthday is around the corner. It is unlikely that I will forget the birthdays of family members.
But, I think Excel has amazing potential to remind you about various important dates. Especially if you want to send birthday wishes to customers (or employees) from a database, Excel is good for that.
What do you think? Please share your experience & tips with us using comments. I am all ears.
Download even more templates:
Visit excel templates page to download several spreadsheet solutions & samples.
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I am not getting sound from the videos. I have checked all the settings and spent several hours searching the Internet to no avail.
Has anyone else had this problem?
Is there anyway to get the Grand Total to be broken out in the same fashion as the items above it? For instance, if you have in column 1, widget a, widget b, and have their sales by month in column 2, I'd like to see the grand total also be by month, for widget a & b combined.
I can't get anything other than a single line for the grand total, rather than the same format as the data above.
Widget A Month Sales
Jan 100
Feb 200
Widget B
Jan 150
Feb 250
Grand total - here I would also like to have Jan, Feb.
Jan 250
Feb 450