It would be geat to have a native feature that will calculate the age for contacts rather than the workaround via workflow by creating a custom property "today's date".
it's possible to use a workflow and a calculated property to approximate their age, but even that doesn't quite work, as calculated properties round to the nearest number, so if a contact is e.g. 23 years and 8 months old, it will round up to 24 years old.
After some work, here's the best solution/workaround I've been able to come up with.
To get a calculated age:
Create (if you don't have one) a date property for Date of Birth
Create a date property to store the last date age was calculated. e.g. "internal - last date age calculated"
Create a calculation property (e.g. internal - calculated age (rounded)) that is the time between "Date of Birth" and "internal - last date age calculated"
Create an active list (e.g. "Workflow - requires age update") whose rule is "if last calculated age date hasn't been updated in 30 days or is empty" AND "Date of Birth" is known. (feel free to choose a different frequency if desired. I just didn't want to bog down the system unneccessarily and once a month seemed fine)
Create a workflow that enrolls anyone in the previously made list. be sure to enable re-enrollment. this workflow will only have one step: update the "internal - last date age calculated" property to "today's date".
This setup mostly works, with one exception -- calculated properties will round times to the nearest year when displaying the value in a contact view. so if someone is e.g. 31 years old and 6+ months, then they will be rounded up to 32 years old. A workaround to get a more accurate age:
Create a calculation property (e.g. Calculated Age) and give it a custom formula of: "internal - calculated age (rounded)" / 31536000000
why 31,536,000,000? because the time between property ("internal - calculated age (rounded)") is stored in 1000ths of a second. so 1000 * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 365 days = 31,536,000,000.
Afterward, your new "Calculated Age" property will display age with several decimal points. e.g. 22.7893.
Hope this helps others. I'd much prefer a built in field, but this will do for now. haha.
>1000 * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 365 days = 31,536,000,000. This is not considered about a leap years. I believe the formula below is better 1000 * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 365.25 days = 31,557,600,000
