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, the people at Airtable only designed their product to work in the United States, which is a pretty gigantic & glaring oversight. Nothing in the product works properly for other countries, including calendars, numbers, currency, phone numbers, text direction, etc. It’s a pretty amateur decision on their part.

[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]

Airtable is notoriously bad about responding to customer requests, so I definitely wouldn’t hold your breath on this one. People have been asking for better international support in this forum for 6 years, and nothing yet.

You may want to email support@airtable.com with your suggestion — just to let them know that there is continued demand for this — but you’ll likely receive their standard email response that says: “That’s a great idea! I can see how that would be very helpful! I’ll share this with the developers!”

I would probably just use a single line text field for your phone numbers, and manually do the formatting yourself. You could also try creating a formula field that formats your numbers properly, but that would require creating an additional field that is non-editable by the user, so it might cause extra confusion & clutter.

[ScottWorld]

Another idea here:

You could use Make’s phone number module to automatically format a phone number in a text field.

There is a small learning curve with Make, which is why I created this basic navigation video to help. I also provide the links to a few other Make training resources there as well. For example, to instantly trigger your Make scenarios from Airtable, check out this thread.