Formatting telephone numbers

[TwoJ]

Hi

Been awhile since I posted here.

Yesterday I imported a lot of contacts from people cell phones into
Outlook2003 and there are a lot of contacts whose telephone #'s are
formatted fine eg (xxx) xxx-xxxx but then others are are just entered as
xxxxxxxxxx. I've taken a good look around all the posts and it seems the
most common problem is that the local dialing properties are not set
properly. I've checked and reset mine and things seem fine - it works for
new entries but it will not reformat the ones that are already entered.

Any suggestions on how to break apart the xxxxxxxxxx back to (xxx) xxx-xxxx?

 

[Russ Valentine [MVP-Outlook]]

None of these settings will affect existing Contacts and frequently they
will not apply to Contacts that are imported.
There is no native way to back such a global change in Outlook. Many people
just export to Excel, use Find and Replace to make the change, and then
reimport to Outlook. I've never tried it myself.