Obsidian - Tracking birthdays

A separate note for each of my contacts in a folder called People. That's not creepy at all, right?.. Actually, I watched a few YouTube videos when I was figuring out the best way to have Obsidian "warn" me when a birthday was coming up, and it's amazing how meticulously some people track their contacts, or creepy AF, depending on how you look at it. I was going for something simpler.

I wanted to update my existing Daily Note to include a table that would list up birthdays upcoming within the next month. I found a few ways to accomplish this. There are some great plugins specifically for tracking contacts and birthdays, but I didn't want a plugin; just a simple table in my daily note. It proved more difficult than I imagined, but with help from the Obsidian Forum and ChatGPT, I settled on this solution. The base code came from a kind contributor who you can see on the link. ChatGPT tweaked it a bit for me.

Folder and files

Firstly I created a folder called People, and inside this folder are separate files for each of my contacts. The file names are the names of the contacts, eg Duck, Pig.md The file contains some YAML, and that's it, however you could go crazy depending on what you want to track. For me it's just birthdays.

Requirements

• Obsidian

• A Daily Note template

• Dataview plugin

• Calendar plugin

• Templater plugin

YAML

The YAML format is critical, especially the dates property. You can add whatever you like to the YAML, as long as it includes name and dates, like below.

The Meat and Potatoes

Rather than pasting the rather long Dataview query here, I'll post my entire Daily Note template on github. My template includes a few other dataview queries, but the one we are discussing here is the "Upcoming birthdays (1 month)" section.

What you get

The Dataview query will output a table showing Name, Birthday, Days until birthday, and Age the person will be. That’s it. Thank you jpfieber!