Is @cdthomer 's solution easier than a straight regex solution like this one? I can't see the advantage of using substrings to the direct regex approach, there might be one I don't know of.
This was done by @ccstone on another thread. Does anybody know what kind of dash should be used by the way? hyphen, en dash or em dash... ? I have always used the hyphen for dates. I don't format phone numbers this way though.
To get the formatting you want @Life_Crafting I think the last but one action in @ccstone 's macro should have the 'replace with' box changed from ($1) $2-$3 to $1-$2-$3
I tested this and it works fine if you select a single phone number and copy it onto the clipboard. I am sure you could use modified regex that picks up line breaks on a long list if the numbers were on seperate lines and save even more time.
I am not sure exactly how to do that to pick up the pattern line by line as it were. Doing this kind of thing one by one is tedious very often? You could speed up ccstone's macro @cdthomer 's way in fact, automating a lot of the copy paste and select keystrokes. I would use the system clipboard too: why do you use a named clipboard @cdthomer? Is there a specific reason for saving them in such a store?