Different phone formatting?

[Robin_Thomass]

Hi all,

I use the phone field a lot in my tabs but I don’t live in the US and so what I get is a very odd and inconvenient formatting of my clients phone numbers.

For instance I want to call a french number which should be formatted as follow : 06 01 23 45 67
it shows in Airtable as (060) 123 45-67.

When I’m using the app on my phone I can just click but I’m also making a lot of calls from my office. So I manually type numbers and the formatting is very distracting and I always have to double check before making a call.

My collaborators have the same problem and while it doesn’t look like much it adds up to a lot of lost time.

Is there a way to change the number formatting ? My iphone does it automatically as I type numbers in so i’m a bit surprised that I can’t do it on Airtable.

Thanks for your input.

[ScottWorld]

Unfortunately, Airtable only designed their product to work in the United States, which is a pretty gigantic & glaring oversight. Almost nothing in the product works properly for other countries, including calendars, numbers, currency, phone numbers, text direction, etc.

2024 update: they finally updated currency fields to work in Europe, but that's it.

Your best bet would be to use Make... see my post below.

[Robin_Thomass]

That’s a shame. I’m not used to following the community forums and so I don’t really know how reactive the devs are when they get a suggestion or an oversight is brought to their attention… Do you think it will get fixed at some point or should I just get used to the “odd” formatting ?

[ScottWorld · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately, Airtable doesn't offer any other automatic phone number formatting except for U.S. phone formatting. You may want to email support@airtable.com with this feature request.

However, if you want automatic phone number formatting, you can turn to Make's Airtable automations & integrations, because Make has native Phone Number Formatting Integrations built directly into their product!

You can automate the conversion of any phone number into the local standard phone number formatting for that region. It also gives you a variety of different formatting to choose from. For example, in USA, it gives you the choice of 111-222-3333, (111) 222-333, +12223333, and more.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread.

For example, here is how you would instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.

I also give live demonstrations of how to use Make in many of my Airtable podcast appearances here.

For example, in this video, I show how to work with Airtable arrays in Make.

p.s. If you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with any of this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld