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A friend of mine has his birthday on the 29.Feb. and I've created a repeating event in Google Calendar for this. Google Calendar shows this event on leap years but not on non-leap years (like next week!).

I had expected the calendar to move the event either to the day before or the day after (either direction can be argued), but not showing the event at all is a bug in my opinion.

Is there a way I can fix this?
Is this a known bug in Google Calendar? (Will it ever be fixed?)
How would you expect this to be handled?

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Logically, the event only repeats every four years =) – Gipsy King Feb 24 '11 at 14:05
@Gipsy, I agree in principle :) but my friend would be sad if I'd only congratulate him in leap years. – Torben Gundtofte-Bruun Feb 24 '11 at 15:50
1  
This may be a little low-tech, but why not set a reminder on the 28th? – tomfumb Feb 24 '11 at 20:01
Yes, that's another very good solution because it's so simple I didn't even think of it! But it doesn't answer the question itself. – Torben Gundtofte-Bruun Feb 24 '11 at 23:07

2 Answers

up vote 22 down vote accepted

Some one came up with a great solution that writes an event on your calendar on the 60th day of the year, equivalent to Feb 29th or Mar 1st dependent.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Calendar/thread?tid=1afbf0737d261d5c&hl=en

You want an event that recurs on the 60th day of any year equivalent to Mar-1 or Feb-29 where applicable. I have done a bit of source code below. Just replace "Someone" with the name of the person you want, save as a .ics file type in notepad and upload to your calendar.

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20090301
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20090301
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;INTERVAL=1;BYYEARDAY=60
DESCRIPTION:
LOCATION:
SEQUENCE:0
STATUS:CONFIRMED
SUMMARY:Someone's Birthday
TRANSP:TRANSPARENT
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Hope this helps.

To import the ICS file: in the left-hand list of "My Calendars", click the "Settings" link, and then on the "Import Calendar" link.

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60th day -- what an awesome workaround!! I can confirm this works just fine: this year the event lands on 01.Mar. and next year on 29.Feb. = perfect! – Torben Gundtofte-Bruun Feb 23 '11 at 12:59
up vote 4 down vote

Here's an alternative solution that yields the last day of February (either the 28th or the 29th) instead:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20120229
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20120229
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;INTERVAL=1;BYMONTH=2;BYMONTHDAY=-1
DESCRIPTION:
LOCATION:
SEQUENCE:0
STATUS:CONFIRMED
SUMMARY:Someone's Birthday
TRANSP:TRANSPARENT
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Generally, this is more appropriate for birthdays, since in many jurisdictions, 29 February is legally just a simple extension of 28 February for the purposes of calculating anniversaries and other annual things.

Of course, you can celebrate the Leap Babies however you want in nonbissextile years; this is just another solution for those who prefer to keep it in February!

If this helps, you may wish to read more about the flexibility offered by custom recurrence rules in the iCalendar specification.

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