You can use Click‑To‑Call in Excel by creating a hyperlink for the phone number. Microsoft Excel supports the same hyperlinks that your web browser supports. By default, Excel will create a hyperlink for web pages and email addresses without any special formatting. On the other hand, phone numbers must be properly formatted (tel:7174590300) or a function used to make them clickable.
Creating a spreadsheet with a prefix of ‘tel:’ in front of phone numbers will make the spreadsheet unusable for imports into a CRM or other system. It is better to add the click-to-call links in a new column so that the phone numbers are still useful for other things.
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How to create Click‑To‑Call links in Microsoft Excel
- Add a column named Click2Call
- Copy the formula in the Click2Call column
=HYPERLINK(CONCAT("tel:",B2),B2)
How it works
In the above example, we append ‘tel:’ to the B2 cell using the CONCAT function. The HYPERLINK function consists of 2 parts. The link location and the friendly name. Our link location is the CONCAT function result, and our friendly name is the original cell position. The friendly name is optional however it looks cleaner not showing the ‘tel:’ prefix.
Use multiple cells to create Click‑To‑Call links in Microsoft Excel
Sometimes your spreadsheet will have the country code in a separate column. We can easily combine the country code with the phone number by adding the cell position to our CONCAT function.
=HYPERLINK(CONCAT("tel:",B2,C2),B2&C2)
Conclusion
Creating Click‑To‑Call links in Excel is easy and a great time saver. Clicking a link to make a call is a lot faster than manually dialing a phone number. This is especially true for those that make a lot of phone calls from a contact list.
Click-To-Call works with any phone system that can be associated with the protocol tel in Windows. Microsoft Teams can be used to make calls from Excel. However, it requires a Microsoft Teams Phone service.
Add phone service to Microsoft Teams
