Hi there,

Been doing a little digging and came across one thread that mentions telephone numbers need a "prefix" or some sort to not show up as numbers in the billions. I've seen some other tutorials where MapPoint has telephone numbers show up formatted just like they should be: (XXX) XXX-XXXX.

I'm a total newbie with this program and what I'm looking for is what do I need to do in Excel to have the phone numbers look like phone numbers in MapPoint? Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks so much.

This shouldn't be too hard, telephone formatting is built into Excel's Format Cells dialog.

Take a look at the attached:

Say the phone number starts out as in column A.

I copied this to column B, and right-clicked on it and went to Format Cells as shown.

Column B looks nice and pretty in Excel, but internally it's still a number, so I'm not sure if this would work for MapPoint. When MapPoint imports, it might still see the number and treat it as such.

So -- take a look at column C. I copied column B and pasted it into Notepad, then I copy/pasted from Notepad back into column C. Now in Excel this is actually a string with all the extra characters () and -. So MapPoint would treat this as a proper phone number in the balloon.

Hope this helps!
Eric

Hi Eric,

Thanks so much for your reply. I did have all the phone numbers formatted in excel as "phone numbers" and bet you're right that they were treated as numbers still.

So, looks like I've got some cutting and pasting to do and we'll see what happens.

Best-Greg

It's not clear from the example, but you should be able to simply do one copy/paste for the entire column, you definitely would NOT have to copy every row. Hope this helps!

Eric

Sorry, I wasn't very clear... I've got about 30 different sheets with phone numbers in them and will just do it column by column. That'll work fine!

Again, thanks for your input on this.

Have a great day-Greg

I had the same issue with Peronnel ID's

It was solved by just adding a space on the front of the number using concatenation.

Hope this helps

Sweet, thanks Jasper. I'll try that!