Slate formats phone numbers based on each country's official formatting standards.

• For a USA phone number, that is +1 000-000-0000.

• For a UK phone number, that might be +44 00 0000 0000 (spaces in specific segments, no hyphens). 

You don't need to worry about trying to format phone numbers at the time of data capture; reformatting a phone number is a data export and reporting consideration.

To apply different formatting in a query or report, add exports to a query library that use a custom SQL format type or a formula type.

Example formula:

(case when (@val like '+1 %') then stuff(stuff(@val, 4, 0, '('), 8, 1, ') ') else @val end)

Example results:

If it's in a query library, you won't have to do this each time; you'll get the desired formatting whenever you add that export.

You will still store the phone number with the official formatting, and other systems that might need a phone number fed to them might require even a different format (such as E.164, which has no spaces or hyphens), so there's no one-size-fits-all type of formatting for these.