Last week I had another one of those Duhreka! moments; a combination of Eureka!, I found it, and Duh!, it should have been obvious, you moron.

Myrl had gone back to Texas for a week on a family matter, and she left me a list of phone numbers where she could be reached. I started creating a group of temporary Address Book entries for the hotels and other places that weren’t already in my Contacts, when I realized there was a much simpler way.

In the back of my mind I was aware that you could click on a phone number on a web page and the iPhone would dial it.

OK, I’m showing my age with “dial”, but it’s so much easier than saying something like iPhone would place the call. (I still “tape” TV shows on my Mac Mini, too.)

Anyway, I thought if iPhone recognizes a phone number on a web page and dials it, where else does it recognize phone numbers?

The answer is just about anywhere: in a Note, an e-mail, a calendar event, a text edit document, a Pages document. About the only places where iPhone didn’t recognize a phone number was in a spreadsheet or pdf. So I just created a quick note like this and all I had to do was tap it to call.

Moreover, the iPhone was smart enough to recognize a phone number whether you formatted it as 541 555 1234, (541) 545 1234, 5415551234 or some combination thereof. I didn’t try binary or Roman Numerals, but if iPhone can’t handle those, Siri probably can.