Storing phone numbers in LibreOffice Base

April 23, 2013 12:21 PM

I am putting together a small contact database in LibreOffice Base for a friend. I am trying to figure out how to do input validation on data like phone numbers, postal state abbreviations, and ZIP codes. It must be possible to set this up, but I can't find any helpful documentation. Can the hive mind fill the gap?
posted by philosophygeek to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Are you looking for help with how to make LibreOffice validate input at all, or with how to find out if, e.g., a numeric string is a valid postal code for a given location?

Validating postal codes is one of those things that is a lot trickier than you might at first think, by the way. For what countries? Are you handling US military postal codes? And so on.
posted by thelonius at 12:29 PM on April 23, 2013

I'm aiming for the simple version. I'd like to input a phone number and have it formatted as (DDD) DDD-DDDD, prompting the user if it doesn't have enough digits. I'd like to make sure that zip codes are 5 digits long and that any leading zeros aren't chopped off.
posted by philosophygeek at 12:34 PM on April 23, 2013