OL2002: How to Use the Intellisense Feature in Outlook to Format Custom Phone Number Fields (294550)

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The standard phone number fields offer a certain degree of intellisense formatting. This means that when you type a number in the field, Outlook tries to determine the correct format for that telephone number, and then Outlook parses in the appropriate characters. For example, 4255555555 becomes (425) 555-5555.

This intellisense feature is not available with user-defined fields in Outlook. However, you can create a temporary contact item to format your own phone number fields.

The sample code in this section demonstrates how to leverage the functionality in the Outlook standard phone number fields to format your own phone number field.

The following VBScript code runs on the CustomPropertyChange event of the item. It creates a temporary contact item, populates the standard field BusinessTelephoneNumber with the new value of your custom Phone field, assigns the newly formatted value to the custom field, and then deletes the temporary contact item.

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Sub Item_CustomPropertyChange(ByVal Name)
   ' Declare constants and variables
   Const olContactItem = 2
   Dim objPhoneFld 'As UserProperty
   Dim objTempContact 'As Contact Item

   ' Run the code if "Phone" changed.<BR/>
   ' Phone is the name of the user-defined field that stores
   ' the phone number.
   If Name = "Phone" Then
       Set objPhoneFld = Item.UserProperties("Phone")
       ' Create a temporary contact item.
       Set objTempContact = Application.CreateItem(olContactItem)
       ' Populate a standard phone field in the temp item
       ' with the value of the custom phone field.
       ' This should resolve correctly.
       objTempContact.BusinessTelephoneNumber = objPhoneFld.Value
       ' Populate the custom phone field with the newly resolved
       ' phone number from the standard field.
       objPhoneFld.Value = objTempContact.BusinessTelephoneNumber
       ' Delete the temporary item.
       objTempContact.Delete
   End If
End Sub