excel formatting of telephone numbers

chipwdomi 

In your examples in red, the cell value is a number. That is why you see it as a plain mumber in the formula bar. A special number format has been applied to it to make it appear as a phone number in the cell, but the value stored in the workbook is the plain number.

If you want a value such as (954) 731-5100 to be the stored value, it must be a text value, not a number.

I don't know why some values come over from the database as a number and others as a text value.

To convert all phone numbers to text values, you could run the following macro. Select the range with phone numbers first.

Sub ConvertPhoneNumbers()
    Dim rng As Range
    Application.ScreenUpdating = False
    For Each rng In Selection
        If IsNumeric(rng.Value) Then
            rng.Value = rng.Text
        End If
    Next rng
    Application.ScreenUpdating = True
End Sub