What is the PhONEday Convertor™?

The PhONEday Convertor™ is a software application for the Apple Macintosh which will help you convert telephone numbers held on a computer to the new format which comes into effect on British Telecom's PhONEday, 16 April 1995. By this date, everyone in the UK will have a new area code.

This means that all telephone numbers stored on a computer will have to be updated and amended with the new area codes. For a small amount of data, this may not prove an onerous task. But for the vast majority of computer users — from individuals to corporates —there is no short-cut route. Most will need to manually update the records in their databases, contacts management software, accounts software, fax software, etc. — a time-consuming, laborious and error-prone task.

The task is not just a simple one of inserting a '1' after the leading zero in the area code. For many codes this may prove sufficient. But some cities will have an entirely different area code (Leeds, for example); mobile phone numbers will not change; paging companies' codes will change — but not all; international dialing codes (eg. '010 44' for the UK, '010 1' for the USA) will need to be changed to conform to the new international '00' standard.

So, in order to dial a number in the UK or internationally, the new format must be used. The old format will not be recognised and your phone call or fax message will not be transmitted.

The PhONEday Convertor will handle all of this updating automatically for you!

The types of data files you can convert can come from any computer, not just the Mac. As long as the data file is in tab- or comma-delimited text/ascii format, and you can copy it to your Mac (via floppy or a network), the PhONEday Convertor will handle it.

Whilst the PhONEday Convertor™ is very simple to use, the process of converting your telephone numbers can be complicated. You should plan for the changes carefully. Please refer to the chapter entitled Preparing your data for a discussion of a suggested way of doing this.

The software will run on any Macintosh using System 7 or above. It requires only 512k of RAM in which to work and takes up about 88k of disk space.