Click to Call… Sometimes

I love the notion of simplifying tasks with a simple click of the mouse on my notebook or the push of button on my trusty Blackberry handheld. This is especially great for those of you that are like me often 'fat-fingering' the telephone keypad or transposing numbers you read from one medium to the phone on your desk. Enter Unified Communications and the ability to click to call! Now I can quickly search for a contact and voila, literally click to call them and I'm connected faster than I could ever input a phone number (even if I did it correctly!)

One of the biggest pet peeves of mine (and many other people out there I'm sure) is the lack of support for click to calling phone numbers listed in emails. If you are a Blackberry user you know how awesome this feature is to use simply by rolling over a phone number in a signature or in the body of a message. One click and a call is made. It just works. Even if an extension is there it just works. So why the heck can you not do this in Outlook! I realize that if the smart tag tel: proceeded by a number is there than this will work but how many times is that going to be the case? Like the Blackberry, it would be fantastic if Outlook could 'detect' the presence of phone numbers and allow a user to simply Click to Call. Until then, I will just have to continue to cut and paste those numbers or heavens forbid *manually* dial those numbers I guess.

Comments

[Dino Caputo]

Its funny how when you complain about something and write about it the answer comes right out of nowhere. It turn out that I was mistaken (happens now and then) about the lack of this feature in Outlook (and even other office products). It turn out that via the autocorrect features in office, you can indeed enable SmartTags that will recognize numbers, addresses, people, etc in documents and allow the click to call functionality. Mind you its a drop down and click but its better than a kick in the pants.

If you are looking for the SmartTag functionality goto Tools/Options/Spelling/Spelling and Auto Correction/Auto Correct Options/SmartTags. You can enable the phone tag here.

Be careful what you wish for, as you might just get it ;-)