Excel Scheduler needs to send alert to cell phones about appointments

I have a huge excel program so I'm stuck with it all the data and triggers will need to come from excel.

When an appointment is approaching 1 hour before I'd like to send a alarm with the appointment time and clients name to my iphone so I don't miss my appointments.

What I've tried.

I've tried the easy way which is just to send a email from excel to text message to my phone and that works but I'm not able to assign a special ring for it cause AT&T changes the number the text is coming from every time.

I've tried just a email from excel to my iphone with the os and I was still unable to give a special ring tone for a given email.

By the way every phone has a email to text feature for AT&T it's "your phone number"@txt.att.net

So now I'm stuck anyone have a suggestion of a different way to do this?

Do you use MS Outlook as your email/calendar application?

If so, that would be easiest: go from excel through Outlook to your phone. You won't need to mess around with emails, just set your alert settings so that it chimes an hour before hand to remind you to check your phone to look at your calendar.

Well, I can't guess offhand, but I think that would be the direction to go:
Excel => email/calendar app => phone

People have done this in the past; I've looked around here-and-there, so goolging around might reveal that people have already solved this for you.

Can I do a 1 way automatic sync with excel to outlook that updates anytime the data changes on the excel scheduler?

A 1 way syncing of excel to outlook calendar would be great as I could use that on any phone I might have.

I can't test it because I don't use Outlook but:

From Georgia Southwest State University, here's a step-by-step guide to creating an external datalink in Outlook to pull from Excel.

You might have to create a dummy table in your excel spreadsheet to feed into Outlook. Also it looks like maybe Outlook can only take XLS and not XLSX files, but that might have changed; it looks like that's Outlook 2007 in the screencaps but I'm not sure.

There's also a company called Contact Genie that develops add-on software for Outlook import/export; I only know about them because the owner Karl Timmermans answered some of the questions on answers.microsoft.com that got spat back at me when I tried searching there for Outlook/Excel compatability.