remove the "+" symbol in front of phone numbers

[Guest]

I need to remove the "+" symbol in front of my long distance phone numbers
because my palm pilot phone won't dial long distance numbers with a plus
symbol in front of them.

 

[Mark R Penn]

It must be about the only phone in the world that won't then!

When you say long distance, do you mean international? A mobile phone will
interpret the + as a double zero, so if you've put the plus in front of
numbers that don't need "00" at the beginning, or have also included a "00",
or have included any other digit that should be removed when dialling
internationally, that's why your phone can't cope - it's not the phone, it's
the number.

For the UK as an example, the international code is 0044, the area code is
formatted as 01234 but has the leading 0 dropped for international dialling,
and the number is formatted as 567890. So ALL my numbers get entered in the
format "+44 1234 567890". I've never ever come across any mobile phone that
can't deal with that, and the network will charge at local rate if it's not
actually an international call, even though you're using an international
number format.

I have no idea how to change a batch of numbers automatically, but suspect
that there will be some kind of add-on out there to do it.

Mark

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

I have no idea how to change a batch of numbers automatically, but suspect

that there will be some kind of add-on out there to do it.

I don't know if there is a utility to use in outlook, but you can export to
excel and make the change (search and replace should work) then import.

 

[Jim McGowan]

As I do not know which version of Outlook you have, this response applies to
Outlook 2003.

In Outlook, click on Actions>Call Contact>New Call...>Dialing Options.

Toward the bottom of that dialog, you will see a box that is titled,
"Settings for phone number formatting and dialing". Just beow that title
you'll see "Automatically add coutry codes to local phone numbers". If there
is a checkmark in the checkbox next to that line, remove it.

I don't know if this will remove all country codes already in your contact
cards, but it will prevent any more from being automatically added.

 

[RMC]

I have a similar problem.

I live in japan and the telephone system here does not recognize the +. So
if I dial a +nn, I get a message from the telephone company telling me use
the correct number for international calls, which is different for every
company. So, intead of dialing +44, I should 0046010 (specific for my
telehpne carrier).. GO FIGURE WHY Japan does not recognize it...

Anyways, fot his reason i have do duplicate my data base, one entry will
contain phone numbers with the standar format +nn, and another with the code
used only in Japan 0046010

The problem i have is, that when i import the EXCEL file into my Outlok
2007, the phone entries originally 0046010, will become +0046010...

So Outlook is recoignizing the 00 in front of the file, and it adds the +. I
have added spaces before the 0045010, but still whne I import, the result is
+0046010.

The question is... How can I stop Outlook 2007 to edit the phone numbers
that start with 00, and changing them into +00.

Thank in Advance

Rafael