Starting from Outlook 2013, when I enter 10 digit number in Contacts, it auto formats to US regional numbering scheme. These contacts are synced to my Android phone through Exchange Server. Unfortunately I am not in US and unfortunately cell numbers in my country are 10 digits too. Below is print screen showing auto formatting getting kicked off when it thinks it is US number. To save from this hassle, I have been entering new numbers in my phone and those numbers when gets synced through Exchange to Outlook are not formatted.

Yes my PC regional settings are set to US. This because I cannot stand nitty gritty things like Time/Date/Currency/Keyboard appearing in other formats.

I would just like to disable auto formatting for contact numbers in Outlook 2013.

Hi,

We can disable the country code before the phone number, such as +1. To do this, please refer:

http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/config/dialing-outlook-phone-numbers/

However, we can't stop Outlook 2013 from formatting the phone number, we can achieve this goal in Outlook 2010 by changing the Country/Region to the International Freephone Service. See:

http://www.slipstick.com/problems/phone-number-formatting-for-outlook-and-smartphones/

As mentioned in the "How to Keep Outlook from Formatting Numbers" in the article above, the only method we can use to stop Outlook 2013 from formatting phone numbers is entering too many numbers for your location. If the phone number is longer than 11 numbers, it will stay the format. The number can be dialed as the phone system ignores the extra number at the end.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Steve Fan
TechNet Community Support

• Edited by Steve FanMicrosoft contingent staff, Moderator Friday, January 24, 2014 5:30 AM
• Marked as answer by willstay Monday, January 27, 2014 8:58 AM

Yes adding extra trailing number helps. I will keep hoping Outlook 2016 will restore feature to disable number formatting.

I cannot believe this ability was taken away.  So now Outlook 2013 is not going to work with our phone system and will no longer pop up the associated contact when the call comes in.  Our phone system cannot format the numbers and apparently the connector with Outlook doesn't strip out the readability characters when doing to search to find the contact.  Adding an extra digit doesn't work either as the system doesn't see that as a match.  It isn't like dialing where extraneous digits just go to neverland.

I know it is a nice feature to auto-format, but like ALL features of software, there should be an ability to turn it off.

Complete disregard for the growing integration between phone, VOIP, email applications, and contacts.  How uninspiring that MS doesn't see the need to grow the options in Outlook.  But I am sure this works great with Communicator or whatever the MS unified communication product is called now.

I expect MS to issue an update to fix 2013 in the near future.  I really can't express my frustration fully without getting this post deleted.

I tried everything but there's indeed no way to get rid of the country code prefix in the contacts. Changing the Region settings (this is where the country prefix is taken from !?!?!) is the only way to change the country code in all your contacts, but REMOVING them is not possible. Why is the former option for automatically adding country codes removed in Outlook 2013 ? To force everyone to only use MS Lync or Skype for telephony ?