# Birthday Help

The Birthday plug-in searches your address book and displays upcoming birthdays.

## Groups Preferences

By default Birthday searches all contacts in your address book for birthdays in the next few days. If you have a lot of people in your address book, chances are you don't really want to be notified about the birthday of every single one. Use the Groups preference pane to chose one ore more groups to search:

Groups Preferences

Note that address book allows you to put groups inside other groups. In case you select a group that contains subgroups, Birthday will automatically select – and search – all these subgroups, too.

## Display Preferences

To specify what to display when, use the Display preferences:

Display Preferences

With the settings shown above, Birthday will search for birthdays in the next 14 days every hour. (The time interval between different entries is always 30 seconds.)

If Show Portrait if available is selected, Birthday will display the picture stored in Address Book for that contact in front of each entry.

## Date Format Preferences

Date Format Preferences

Date of Birth is the date displayed in the contextual menu.

Birthday is the date show in the ticker itself.

This is a partal list of available placeholders:

Specifier | Description
--- | ---
`%%` | A `'%'` character
`%a` | Abbreviated weekday name
`%A` | Full weekday name
`%b` | Abbreviated month name
`%B` | Full month name
`%d` | Day of the month as a decimal number (01-31)
`%e` | Same as `%d` but does not print the leading 0 for days 1 through 9
`%m` | Month as a decimal number (01-12)
`%x` | Date using the date representation for the locale, including the time zone
`%y` | Year without century (00-99)
`%Y` | Year with century (such as 1990)

You can find a complete list here

## Context Menu

Clicking on a birthday entry in the ticker will open the contact in Address Book.
Control-click (or right-click) on an entry to open the contextual menu:

Contextual Menu

Clicking the person's name will once again open the contact.

Choose Suspend Notifications for Today to prevent Birthday to show this entry for the next 24 hours. Selecting Suspend Notifications for this Birthday will suppress any notification for this particular birthday — subsequent birthdays of this person will be shown again.