Phone Extension Numbers

[pyrotherm 1]

Forgive me if I have missed this, but I have searched for a while before posting here...

I am new to Evernote, and was wooed by the business card scanning feature.

I noticed after scanning some cards, that the phone numbers didn't come out in the right format; "No problem" I thought, I'll just go in and fix the formatting once I'm done scanning all these cards in.

I am attempting to input numbers in the following format, but am having issues: (555) 555-5555 x1234

Does Evernote have support for "extensions" as such, or is this something that's just missing?

 

[gazumped 11,667]

1 hour ago, pyrotherm said:

I am attempting to input numbers in the following format

Hi.  Where are you inputting numbers to?  And what device / OS / Evernote version are you using?

[PinkElephant 8,117]

@pyrotherm You have a very US-centric view, just to mention it. The world has more phone number formats than that, so any preset will probably run against some „make it look nice“ convention somewhere on the globe.

Usually apps dedicated to such jobs like scanning business cards will ask or try to detect the country of origin, and adapt certain field’s accordingly. Just as an example: In continental Europe ZIP Codes are usually numeric - in UK they are alpha (no wonder they choose the Brexit, instead of changing their ZIP codes). My card scanning app works like that - and I usually scan cards grouped by country, and select the next country before starting the scan. Scanning quality is significantly improved, the fields look better, and the OCR improves.

Back to EN: None of this exists in the EN business card scanner. You don’t need to format by „extension“ - the number will be dialed just fine without any brackets, dashs, x-es or else. If you want to have it adapted to your viewing habits, you probably need to change it by hand. No idea if the dialing from the note will still work after saturating a numeric field with characters.

If you want a change, issue a support ticket, or use the feedback function.

[pyrotherm 1]

45 minutes ago, gazumped said:

Hi.  Where are you inputting numbers to?  And what device / OS / Evernote version are you using?

@gazumped After taking a photo of a business card, I went back into the created contact record and attempted to edit the existing phone number, as well as add an additional phone number field, both wouldn't allow me the format I was looking for, so was wondering if there was any formatting syntax in Evernote for extension dialing

44 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

@pyrotherm You have a very US-centric view, just to mention it. The world has more phone number formats than that, so any preset will probably run against some „make it look nice“ convention somewhere on the globe.

Usually apps dedicated to such jobs like scanning business cards will ask or try to detect the country of origin, and adapt certain field’s accordingly. Just as an example: In continental Europe ZIP Codes are usually numeric - in UK they are alpha (no wonder they choose the Brexit, instead of changing their ZIP codes). My card scanning app works like that - and I usually scan cards grouped by country, and select the next country before starting the scan. Scanning quality is significantly improved, the fields look better, and the OCR improves.

Back to EN: None of this exists in the EN business card scanner. You don’t need to format by „extension“ - the number will be dialed just fine without any brackets, dashs, x-es or else. If you want to have it adapted to your viewing habits, you probably need to change it by hand. No idea if the dialing from the note will still work after saturating a numeric field with characters.

If you want a change, issue a support ticket, or use the feedback function.

@PinkElephant As I live in the U.S., you are 100% correct, my apologies for not looking into the origin of this app or its development team. I know that we have ISO formats for dates/time, is there any European / International standard for phone number extension dialing that Evernote uses? Or am I way off base here? As a hobbyist software developer and I.T. admin myself, I wouldn't expect an app developer to cater to the whims of an ignorant user anyways 😉

[PinkElephant 8,117]

The phone systems have taken different routes to where they are today. Since phone numbers are pretty fixed, even if today everything is VoIP anyhow, the historical structures remain. There may be some ISO conventions, but probably only to make sure the international codes work between country networks.

If EN would like to build a full card scanning app, IMHO they would better outsource or buy that part of the software instead of trying to develop and maintain (!) it all by themselves. What they currently do is a minimalistic approach, that serves the occasional user, but not any professional use case.

Anybody who wants a professional handling of business card scanning (for example to feed a CRM) should look elsewhere.
 

[Jon/t 1,292]

No idea if this will help but the HTML format for a clickable phone number with extension is:

<a href="tel:6031112298p000"></a>

So try 5555555p1234

Or try and add a web link to the number in Evernote as:

tel:6031112298p000

 

[PinkElephant 8,117]

Just the numbers will do, without any „extension“ fuzz. This extension stuff is from the time when companies ran their own telephone exchange. Today everything works through VoIP - you just dial the numbers, as they come.