Windows 10 tells you when it’s your friend’s birthday. It does so on the lock screen as well as in the Calendar app. You may or may not like Windows 10 giving you these friendly little reminders to wish your friend a happy birthday. Windows 10 gets quite zealous with its reminders. It doesn’t limit itself to just friends but will even alert you when a business contact has a birthday. Here’s how you can turn off birthday alerts in Windows 10, and a quick look at where they come from.
Birthday alerts come from the Calendar app. That is the simplest explanation but, if you dig a little deeper you will see how the app ends up pulling birthdays from multiple calendars.
Turn Off Birthday Alerts In Windows 10
Open the Calendar app. You have an account, an Outlook or Gmail, or some other account added to this app. It is through those accounts that the app is finding birthdays to remind you about.
Look at the bottom left column of the Calendar app. If the left column is collapsed, click the hamburger button at the top left to expand it.
At the bottom are all accounts and calendars that you’ve added to the app. You need to turn off the ones that are sending birthday dates without turning off alerts for events and meetings. Expand the accounts you’ve added. Under ‘Outlook’ for example, you will find a ‘Birthdays’ calendar. Simply uncheck it to remove birthdays. Follow suit for all other accounts. For Gmail, for example, you will need to uncheck the ‘Address Book’ calendar to remove birthdays.
Where Did These Calendars Come From?
When you add an account to the Calendar app, for example a Gmail account, and your Gmail account is connected to other calendars, the app consolidates all events into one place. You might have just added one account but through it, several others were added.
A quick way to track down which calendar a birthday is shown from is to match the color of the birthday on the calendar with that of the calendars listed in the left column.
If you turn off birthday alerts in Windows 10, you will still continue to see alerts for meetings and events. In some cases you might not see who you’re meeting; case in point the Address book calendar for Gmail. If you turn it off, you might not see who has sent you an invite. To circumvent this, consider turning off the information from Gmail itself.