phone number format in Mountain Lion

I just submitted asking that they return the option of 'no formatting' for phone #s in Contacts.. We need everyone to submit the request or they will leave it as is. PLEASE take the time to submit the form. Thank you!

While there are many things about AddressBook which still need improvement, the fact that this obvious DISimprovement has yet to fixed has turned what should have been a temporary annoyance into a head-scratching absurdity. For whatever good it will do, here's the text of my latest Feedback/Request on this topic:

First of all, please include "AddressBook" in the pull-down list under Feedback Area in this Mac OS X category.

Secondly, PLEASE reinstate the functionality which was inexplicably removed in the latest OS (and I believe in Lion as well), and let US -- the users -- decide how we want to format our phone number text strings. Let US once again choose between XXX-XXX-XXXX, or (XXX) XXX-XXXX, or XXX.XXX.XXXX, or whatever each one of us individually prefers -- even if that choice is to have no auto formatting at all.

It's supposed to be OUR database, after all -- improving any software means making it MORE flexible and MORE easily customizable, NOT dumbing it down and giving users no choice whatsoever, especially in an instance where they once had several options.

This Back-To-the-Future fix is embarrassingly overdue. Please just do it -- and then, lo and behold -- it'll be done!

Thank you.

Well-stated John. I hope others use your text for their submissions.

Has anyone tried the new OSX (Maverick) to see if this issue is resolved in this new OS?

It’s just like it was in Mountain Lion.

Unfortunately Apple didn't hear us. Maverick has the same limitation. I quit....

I agree - we should be able to format telephone numbers the way we want them, as it was before. I have Maverick and this is still not solved.

Furthermore, as most of us enter a couple in one single contact entry, it would be a good idea to have a way of knowing whose mobile, work number or email address is whose, ie mobile m (man) and mobile w (woman), home email m and home email f, etc. We are otherwise forced to enter 2 entries for a couple which is far from ideal.

Thank you.

Furthermore, as most of us enter a couple in one single contact entry, it would be a good idea to have a way of knowing whose mobile, work number or email address is whose, ie mobile m (man) and mobile w (woman), home email m and home email f, etc. We are otherwise forced to enter 2 entries for a couple which is far from ideal.

I am not sure about your "most of us" statement. I have never heard of people making entries for couples. The whole contacts scheme is designed to be one per person. I always have one entry per person, and everyone I know, too.

How do you find this far from ideal?

Dominique, you can do this - choose custom on the field label and write whatever label you want. Seems like a strange way to organise details though. However, that is off topic, this thread is about the frankly bizarre inability of Mac OSX Lion and above to correctly format some phone numbers and the removal of the option to do so manually in previous versions of the OS.

We are amazed this isn't fixed in Mavericks, but must hobble on with the shonky code provided by Apple.

Just in case someone is still searching a way to see phone-numbers and what ever you type in, the way you type it - with yosemite beta - you get, what you type (wysiwyg!!! - even 2014). You can even add names to phone-numbers in big companies and they are displayed with all Unicode-Charactes (impossible in 10.7 through 10.9). If you enter "030 / 1234-567 Anton Müller" you won't get anymore "0301234567AntonMller"!

And yes I don't want to enter every person separately, which would double my 1500 entries - also at the iPhone. I want all people connected to the same company at the same entry, and all family-members living at the same place at the same entry.

And yes there are still people using an iPhone4 without S and without Siri, so the number of entries matters (my wife is using an iPhone without anything following). Products you don't' have to throw away after 6 months was a characteristics of Apple (in stone ages - 2 decades ago) - my 520c is still working!

There is a way of doing what you want to some degree. As some have noted, if you include letters or the wrong punctuation, then the number is displayed as you wish. Unfortunately, this can look off if it is not exactly what you want.

So the solution is to add invisible characters. While editing, open Character Viewer and select Punctuation - All. Scroll down to the bottom, and select one of the empty spaces, which are actually different kinds of spaces and appear as missing symbols. Drag this up to the number you are editing, and now you can format it as you wish and it will not change. Haven't tried rebooting, but I don't know why it should change.

So, it is still broken three years on? Such a simple fix too, to allow manual formatting again. Many areas of the MacOS have lost user control, and generally a reduction in flexibility of use. I've also noticed general attention to detail going down the toilet, especially in Yosemite. Have you seen the buttons? They look like Windows 95!

Apple, please allow once again, manual formatting of phone numbers that you broke/removed (for reasons entirely unknown) about three years ago.

That does not work. There is a problem. Part of that is manual formatting has been removed, and some number cannot be formatted correctly. It has nothing to do with a + sign.

Apart from the previous responses indicating to prefix plus-sign, country-code, and space character in front of the full phone number, then letting auto-format perform the official formatting for that country, or the special categorization technique, I found the following also works, though I need to enlist the help of others trying to solve this problem to tell me if they find the following fix introduces any other unintentional, unwanted side effects.

Enter the number as you want. At the end, press control-q, then tab. Not ⌘-q (that is, not Command-q). The control-q tells the field to take the next character literally, so instead of moving to the next field when you press tab, it inserts the tab character. This prevents Contacts from auto-formatting the field. It doesn't affect dialing the field (whether to Skype on the Mac or from my synced iPhone), but those are my only use cases for phone numbers; I don't know for example, if someone's AppleScript would break on finding an embedded tab in the phone number field.

The one drawback I can find so far with this approach is if you edit the phone number on your iPhone, it is auto-formatted and you will have to re-format it on your Mac to get it back to your custom format.

To automaticit:

I am currently running Yosemite and using an old HP Photosmart C7280 all-in-one printer/fax

I'll have to try this control-q, then tab trick, though it won't help long term as I frequently add or edit a contacts in iOS. My problem with the auto formatting is not cosmetic. It breaks fax dialing on my old HP all-in-one printer. You see, the Mac attempts to send a fax to the selected users fax number, but it sends a formatted number with parens around the area code. My C7280 sees the parens as invalid characters and fails to dial. If I select to send directly to a typed-in phone number sans parens (spaces or dashes seem to be OK), checking a prefix in the FAX print dialog, like sending a 1 before the area code, it also fails as the C7280 sees 1W8007071234 and it fails again when it sees the W in the number. Since I rarely send faxes, I have to re-discover these quirks each time, and forget about teaching my wife how to do this.