Upcoming Birthday Notification

Assuming you’ve created a DateOfBirth (Or Birthday, or Whatever) this could work (I didn’t really test it) by adding formula field to your table:

IF(IS_SAME(DATEADD({DateOfBirth},-7,'days'),{DateOfBirth},'L'),"✅","")

If it works, the ’L’ can be change to your liking :winking_face:

Yes a Birthday column is created but unfortunately it didn’t work

This is not quite so simple as the comments above seem to indicate due to the need to reconcile the date of Birth to the current year.

Is your Birthday field a “Date” field (it includes the “Year” of birth), or is it a “Single Line Text” field that just has the month/day “5/29”?

It’s a “Date” field MM/DD/YYYY.

I’m using the Employee Directory template and I wanted to add an additional column that would put an emoji.

Could it be that it’s not working because I’m on the free version?

No, you can do this with the free version.

It’s just that, when you compare dates with a formula like DATETIME_DIFF(), it’s going to take the year into account. You want to compare to that employees “Next Birthday”, not their actual “Birth Date”, to get a notification of “1 Week” until their Birthday. It’s just a little more involved, and there are actually a few different approaches you could take. I’m working on what might be the best approach right now.

Yes a Birthday column is created but unfortunately it didn’t work

Yea I realized the year might have something to do with it when you mentioned it before. I really appreciate you taking some time to try and help!

Ok, next question -

In order to do this, I need to calculate the persons age, as well as the date of their next birthday. Would you like those to be explicit fields that you can see in your table, or would you like them wrapped up into a single field that just gives you a notification of their birth week?

Just the notification of their birthday week. Don’t need to display the age

Alright - here’s what I came up with:

First of all, Airtable has some strange quirks under the hood when it comes to dates, times, and timezone recognition. For that reason, in order to make this work, you’ll need to enable the “Time” portion of your “Birthday” field:

It’s unfortunate, but you’ll see that if you switch that off, the dates in the calculation are thrown off by 1 day, even though I am using timezone conversion in the equation (perhaps I can figure out how to avoid this at a later time, but for now, the easy work-around is just to enable the “Time” portion, and set it to 12:00am as a standard).

And then here is your formula for the Notification:

IF(
  IS_SAME(
    DATETIME_FORMAT(
      SET_TIMEZONE(
        DATEADD(
          Birthday,
          DATETIME_DIFF(
            TODAY(),
            Birthday,
            'years'
          ) + 1,
          'year'
        ),
        'America/Phoenix'
      ),
      'L'
    ),
    TODAY()
  ),
  "🎉 🎂 🎉",
  IF(
    DATETIME_DIFF(
      DATETIME_FORMAT(
        SET_TIMEZONE(
          DATEADD(
            Birthday,
            DATETIME_DIFF(
              TODAY(),
              Birthday,
              'years'
            ) + 1,
            'year'
          ),
          'America/Phoenix'
        ),
        'L'
      ),
      TODAY(),
      'days'
    ) < 8,
    "🎂"
  )
)

This will show :birthday: when it is the week of a person’s birthday (within 7 days, inclusive), and will show :tada: :birthday: :tada: on the day of their birthday.

EDIT:
Almost forgot - you need to replace every instance of 'America/Phoenix' (there are 2) in the formula with your timezone from this list:

Supported timezones for SET_TIMEZONE

The SET_TIMEZONE function will allow you to set the timezone for the data from a date type field. This is written in the form "SET_TIMEZONE(datetime, 'timezone identifier')," in which the...

And, of course, use whatever emoji’s or text you want in what get’s displayed…

Alright - here’s what I came up with:

First of all, Airtable has some strange quirks under the hood when it comes to dates, times, and timezone recognition. For that reason, in order to make this work, you’ll need to enable the “Time” portion of your “Birthday” field:

It’s unfortunate, but you’ll see that if you switch that off, the dates in the calculation are thrown off by 1 day, even though I am using timezone conversion in the equation (perhaps I can figure out how to avoid this at a later time, but for now, the easy work-around is just to enable the “Time” portion, and set it to 12:00am as a standard).

And then here is your formula for the Notification:

IF(
  IS_SAME(
    DATETIME_FORMAT(
      SET_TIMEZONE(
        DATEADD(
          Birthday,
          DATETIME_DIFF(
            TODAY(),
            Birthday,
            'years'
          ) + 1,
          'year'
        ),
        'America/Phoenix'
      ),
      'L'
    ),
    TODAY()
  ),
  "🎉 🎂 🎉",
  IF(
    DATETIME_DIFF(
      DATETIME_FORMAT(
        SET_TIMEZONE(
          DATEADD(
            Birthday,
            DATETIME_DIFF(
              TODAY(),
              Birthday,
              'years'
            ) + 1,
            'year'
          ),
          'America/Phoenix'
        ),
        'L'
      ),
      TODAY(),
      'days'
    ) < 8,
    "🎂"
  )
)

This will show :birthday: when it is the week of a person’s birthday (within 7 days, inclusive), and will show :tada: :birthday: :tada: on the day of their birthday.

EDIT:
Almost forgot - you need to replace every instance of 'America/Phoenix' (there are 2) in the formula with your timezone from this list:

Supported timezones for SET_TIMEZONE

The SET_TIMEZONE function will allow you to set the timezone for the data from a date type field. This is written in the form "SET_TIMEZONE(datetime, 'timezone identifier')," in which the...

And, of course, use whatever emoji’s or text you want in what get’s displayed…

saved me couple of hours. you are great. thank you so much for your efforts.

Odd. I copied the exact formula from above, but I get nothing on records where I’ve put a date, and an error on records with no date. No matter what date I enter for someone’s birthday with relation to the current date, the emojis never show.

EDIT: Okay, I got it to work (mostly) by removing the two “+ 1” references from the formula. They were shifting all the years ahead, and nothing was matching. However, there’s still something wrong with the date comparisons. They’re a few hours off or something, because it’s still 2/27 locally, but I only get the exact birthday match if I say the birthday is 2/28. I thought it might be a timezone thing, so I switched every possible date reference to use the SET_TIMEZONE() function, but it’s still not working. If I take the time element off of the birthday field, I can only get a match by setting the birthday to 3/1 (two days off), so now I’m even more confused.

Odd partial-day time shifts are almost always caused by not having all of your date fields set to use (or not to use) UMT similarly. Take a look at this reply on UMT (aka GMT) issues in calculated datetimes. If yours is a problem that can’t be fixed simply by ensuring all date fields use (or don’t use) UMT, see the second item in this reply on easily restating your local time in terms of UMT.

Your first link held the magic that fixed the problem. I replaced the portions of the formula above that calculated the birthday for the current year with your version, and everything works perfectly. The time option for the Birthday field is no longer necessary, which is an added bonus. Here’s the modified formula:

IF(
    IS_SAME(
        DATETIME_PARSE(
            DATETIME_FORMAT(
                Birthday,
                'MMMM D'
            ) & ' ' &
            YEAR(
                TODAY()
            ),
            'MMMM D YYYY'
        ),
        TODAY()
    ),
    "🎉 🎂 🎉",
    IF(
        ABS(DATETIME_DIFF(
            DATETIME_PARSE(
                DATETIME_FORMAT(
                    Birthday,
                    'MMMM D'
                ) & ' ' &
                YEAR(
                    TODAY()
                ),
                'MMMM D YYYY'
            ),
            TODAY(),
            'days'
        )) < 8,
        "🎂"
    )
)

EDIT: So there’s still a problem. The < 8 comparison means that any birthday date prior to the current date—which generates a negative difference—will trigger the second part of the condition. To fix this, I wrapped ABS() around the DATETIME_DIFF().

Justin, this is awesome, thank you so much!
One tweak I need though: I have a list of people and some do have birthdays and some don`t.
The formular you posted produces an “#ERROR!” once there is no birthday entry. Is there any way to hide that error output?

Thanks :slightly_smiling_face:

Justin, thanks for your time. :slightly_smiling_face:
I played around with your idea but I`m afraid I cannot get this to work.
Would you mind pasting the whole formular in here?

It’s literally just wrapping a single IF() function around the longer formula I wrote above. Assuming the birthday date field in your base is named Birthday, it should work. Just for completeness, though, here’s the whole shebang:

IF(Birthday,
    IF(
        IS_SAME(
            DATETIME_PARSE(
                DATETIME_FORMAT(
                    Birthday,
                    'MMMM D'
                ) & ' ' &
                YEAR(
                    TODAY()
                ),
                'MMMM D YYYY'
            ),
            TODAY()
        ),
        "🎉 🎂 🎉",
        IF(
            ABS(DATETIME_DIFF(
                DATETIME_PARSE(
                    DATETIME_FORMAT(
                        Birthday,
                        'MMMM D'
                    ) & ' ' &
                    YEAR(
                        TODAY()
                    ),
                    'MMMM D YYYY'
                ),
                TODAY(),
                'days'
            )) < 8,
            "🎂"
        )
    )
)

Hi Justin, what software do you use to build this formula? I tried to do this in a simple texteditor but the tabs are positioned differently.

Regards,
André

It’s literally just wrapping a single IF() function around the longer formula I wrote above. Assuming the birthday date field in your base is named Birthday, it should work. Just for completeness, though, here’s the whole shebang:

IF(Birthday,
    IF(
        IS_SAME(
            DATETIME_PARSE(
                DATETIME_FORMAT(
                    Birthday,
                    'MMMM D'
                ) & ' ' &
                YEAR(
                    TODAY()
                ),
                'MMMM D YYYY'
            ),
            TODAY()
        ),
        "🎉 🎂 🎉",
        IF(
            ABS(DATETIME_DIFF(
                DATETIME_PARSE(
                    DATETIME_FORMAT(
                        Birthday,
                        'MMMM D'
                    ) & ' ' &
                    YEAR(
                        TODAY()
                    ),
                    'MMMM D YYYY'
                ),
                TODAY(),
                'days'
            )) < 8,
            "🎂"
        )
    )
)