Provide an option to use Direct Number in the Contacts page in Microsoft Outlook 2016
Provide an option to use Direct Number in the Contacts page in Microsoft Outlook 2016 rather than using options like Business 2 etc. Providing an option to create custom phone labels (or fields) within Outlook Contacts would be beneficial.

7 comments
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Joseph F Lais commented
The single most important and useful business phone number to have and to be given is the DIRECT line.
You do not want to call the switchboard, get screened or transferred to the wrong Mr. Anderson. You do not want to try to navigate a phone directory by spelling the persons name on a touch pad. At 5:01pm the company or business phone number are rendered worse than useless, but if the person waiting for your call is at their desk, the DIRECT number will still ring. And if they are not at their desk, it might roll over to their cell phone. And if not, it will roll to their personal voice mail and they might get a text or email alert that your valuable message awaits.
If you have the DIRECT number, it will ring on his or her desk and might even have the caller ID displyaed and prompt the the person to immediately pick it up.
Having the DIRECT phone number means they want to take your call. It means you have a relationship. Please add DIRECT as a phone number classification option in Outlook. -
Larry commented
I would like to suggest Outlook add the feature in Contacts for Custom Label for phone numbers, as Apple has. For example, the contact could be Smith Family and have their home number and home fax. It could then have phone numbers such as John Cell, Mary Cell, Joe Cell, Alice cell, John Work, Mary Work, etc. Custom labels allow each phone number to be dialed directly and incoming calls from each number will be identified on the phone. Apple has this feature in their contacts, but it won't sync with Outlook, as Outlook doesn't have this feature and only allows its labels, such as Home, Mobile, Work. This means I can't create a contact in Outlook if I want to handle contacts this way. Thank you.
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seb commented
Someone in the dev team should try to create a contact outside of Redmond - the experience is a DISASTER and has been a disaster for the last 15 years:
- when i enter an adress it puts the zip code to the city field by default
- when i enter a phone number it tries to format it as a US phone number
- the street adress is often broken down in multiple fields
Some AI could help recognize the country and adapt the parsing rules accordingly + the default country should be easily configurable (i looked for it again & couldn't find it) -
Mark commented
Ability to create custom phone labels (or fields) within Outlook Contacts. No one uses Telex, or Radio any longer. But some contacts have 2 or 3 mobile phones. How are we to distinguish between them? And iPhone will not sync it's custom labels with Outlook.
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Anonymous commented
A LOT of people use the Location field in meeting invites to enter a dial-in number for remote meetings. Outlook should be intelligent enough to parse the Location field, and if it LOOKS like an address, then show a button to plot it on Bing Maps. But if it LOOKS like a phone number (excluding any trailing garbage like conference IDs), then show a button to click-to-dial the phone number using Skype for Business or Teams. Need to make it easier for people to join any kind of meeting for it to start on-time!
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Timppa_K commented
Office Outlook has one mobile number and Outlook.com two. Could it be possible to have similar structure in both. Many have two mobile phones or even more and during sync with android phone second number (car) falls away.
Could it be mobile and mobile 2 like in Outlook.com?
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Philip Sadeghi commented
It'll be really helpful if we could change/ add any user desired field to the Outlook contacts rather than just the default options