phone number format in Mountain Lion

This has been driving me absolutely batty. I stopped putting parenthesis around the area code 20 years ago and I prefer the dot as it is much easier scan, but I also have 400 to 600 addresses and phone numbers that are not in the country I live (USA) and Mountain Lion has made an absolute mess of displaying those numbers. The International numbers, only if I put their country in the country field displays those with their proper local structure, but I have have people with US and International numbers as many work globally and have more than one number and SIM card.

Apple really needs to stop thinking for us, or let us please chose to think for ourselves. This is absolutely dim witted to think this would work.

Under Mountain Lion, I have spent far too much time trying to use this format, xxx.xxx.xxxx, for North American telephone numbers. Mountain Lion 10.8.2 should allow that format.

I was going crazy trying to format #s the way I wanted and was so confused as to why I couldn't until I saw your post. I just called Apple and opened a case. I have #s of folks from various countries with various formatting. Thank you for your post. I'll re-post when I hear back from Apple, hopefully with a solution!

Hi,

Anyone have a solution for the phone number format debacle? It is absurd to think that this feature has caused so many problems for users like me who have 4,000+ contacts, many international. I need to be able to format phone numbers the way I want, not the way Apple thinks I should view them. Without dashes, I cannot adequately recall or view a 7-10 number string. I am tempted to revert back to Lion, wiping everything on the new computer and doing another full migration and reinstall the MS programs. Ridiculous, yes. But I must have the formatting option. What was the logic behind removing this feature Apple, makes NO sense at all. Has there been a work around or a patch, adding this back in? Why fix something that isn't broken? Now it is for sure.

I contacted Apple about this, opened a case, heard nothing back, called AGAIN to follow up and have still heard nothing. I will follow up again and would appreciate anyone else calling as well.

Thank you Susan. I spent hours in the store and currently the only solution is to revert back to Lion. Sadly, this is a very tedious process, but one I have to do. After erasing the harddrive and reinstalling Lion, I then must migrate everything from my other laptop. Finally, I have to reinstall or upgrade programs such as MS Office. What a waste of time for something Apple had no reason to remove, but of critical importance to many of us business users. Hopefully, they wake up and stop telling us how to format contacts!

Apple, put back the phone format tab, we know you read these discussions... You have caused tremendous headaches and countless wasted hours with your staff who search endlessly for fixes... There is no fix unless you add a patch... Please get it done.

Please Apple, back to Lion Address Book format posibilities, giving the option to customize number displaying.

I found the change formatting option on ICloud. It worked fine there. Icloud also remembers the original input format - so the data has not been lost. The software just seems to strip out all blanks and other characters. The problem is therefore in the ML Contacts application.

Apple please provide us with the option that exists on the iCloud application.

I have over 3000 contacts.

Thank you for the heads-up about the formatting option on iCloud. It was such a pleasure to see it working there. Of course, once I opened the Contacts on my Mac, I was disappointed to see the format back to US 😟 Time for yet another follow-up call to Apple. Is anyone else out there calling? The more the merrier!

I've just recently upgraded to ML (10.8.2) from Lion, thinking -- naively -- that after TWO updates this kind of embarrassing oversight would certainly have been corrected.

We NEED to have control over how our phone numbers get formatted on our laptops and on our desktops, not just in the almighty "iCloud". And that basic feature was already there in the Address Books of old, so apparently someone consciously decided to NOT include it in the current version.

Obviously I'll be sending a Feedback message -- and probably setting a reminder to re-send same every week. And obviously anyone accessing this thread who feels the same is encouraged to do likewise.

But the real point on this particular gaff is that we simply shouldn't have to. This is not an "Enhancement", or a "Feature Request". As the many posts in this thread clearly demonstrate, it's a: "Hey guys? Hello? Duh?"...

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Hey John. I just called again. I was told by the tech support gentleman that he would 'issue a report'. When I told him that other reports had been issued but nothing's been done, he said that if enough reports are issued, eventually someone would sit up and take notice.

Soooooo, what this means is that WE NEED TO CALL OFTEN AND HAVE REPORTS ISSUED ABOUT THIS. If we're lucky, maybe Apple will do something.

I'll be calling 2 or 3 times/week.

Hello.

I would like to help, but I live outside USA.

Does anyone knows other way, different from phone calling, to make reports of this issue?

An email or a link to report this problem to Apple's people.

Regards.

As quoted above, just go to...

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

...and let your cyber-voice be heard.

Thanks. I started sending my feedback. Hope we can get a solution soon.

All,

Been at the store with the senior genius. Tried everything including removing specific framework in Mountain Lion's address book. There is no fix to figure out, Apple needs to send the patch, adding back the option. Sending back my entire machine and reverting to my old MBP. Not gonna pay Apple $2,500 without having this feature. Total nonsensical.