It is possible the phone numbers are entered or pasted in as text format.

In that case Custom Formatting or Phone formatting won't take.

You can format all to General then copy an empty cell.

Select the column of phone "numbers" and paste specialaddokesc.

Note: if any have leading zeros the zeros will be dropped.

Alternate method...DataText to ColumnsNextNextColumn Data
FormatGeneralFinish.


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP

On Wed, 31 Oct 2007 09:44:04 -0700, cvegas
wrote:

I'm a db guy so probably missing something very simple here.
Need to format a column with phone numbers 5555551212 into phone format
555-555-1212.

Have tried to select both the complete column and individual columns and
apply the special phone format and also Custom ###-###-#### but neither one
works on this spreadsheet.

What am I missing.

Thanks for any light you can shed on this for me.