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How to Format Phone Numbers in Google Sheets

Google Sheets does not have a built-in feature for formatting phone numbers, but with a little know-how, you can control how they appear.

There are a couple of different tricks you can use to format phone numbers in your spreadsheet.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to format phone numbers in Google Sheets.

Table of Contents

How to Format Phone Numbers

To show you how to format phone numbers in Google Sheets, I will format the phone numbers in this example data:

Format phone numbers example

This data contains unformatted phone numbers that are ten digits with no dashes. These are United States format phone numbers.

Here are the steps to format these phone numbers:

1. First highlight the range of cells that contains the phone numbers that you want to format

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2. In the top menu select Format and then select Number

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3. At the bottom of the drop-down menu select More Formats and then select Custom number format

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4. A box will pop up that allows you to specify the format you want. In our example we have typed: (###) ###-#### as our format. If you don’t want parenthesis around the first digits you can leave that out and add another dash in depending on you want your format to look. Select Apply when you have entered your desired format

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5. The phone numbers have now formatted according to the rules I applied in step 4.

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Other Phone Number Formats

In the previous example, we have created a basic US Domestic style phone number format. If you want to use a different style of format, you can enter different rules into your custom format to get the number looking how you want. Here are some other US phone number options:

  • U.S. Domestic: (###) ###-####
  • U.S. Domestic Dashes: ###-###-####
  • U.S. International: +1-###-###-####
  • U.S. Letterhead Style: ###.###.####

Closing Thoughts

Using custom formatting is the easiest way to deal with phone numbers in Google Sheets.

There are certainly other options like creating a custom formula. But that is outside the scope of this tutorial. For now, custom formatting is going to be the simplest method.

Be sure to watch the video at the top of the page if you need more help setting up this format.

More Google Sheets Tutorials:
Data Validation
How to Convert Text to Date
How to Insert a Diagonal Line