Call-to-Click Breaks Unrelated Functions

I had a user who was not able to paste into Outlook by any method other than plain text.  I took a look at the situation and it was in fact Office-wide: no Microsoft Office application (Word, Excel, &c) was giving any paste options except plain text and a simple ctrl-v would also paste plain text.

It turns out that this stems from a known conflict between Office and Skype’s Click-to-Call.  Click to call is an additional application installed when you install Skype which supposedly gives your browser the ability to send telephone links directly to Skype.  I say supposedly for two reasons.  First of all I have never used either Skype to make this sort of call nor have I ever encountered a telephone link in a Web page.  Second (of only two) you shouldn’t need an entire application to tell a browser how to handle a telephone link.

For your edification a telephone link is basically just like a mailto link (for handling e-mail addresses in Web pages):

Click <a href=”tel:1-800-555-1212″>here</a> for 800 information.

Nothing too terribly exciting.  Outlook or Thunderbird (or any other mail application including Web mail applications) won’t need a separate application to tell your browser (Opera, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, IE, &c) what to do with a mail link.  Likewise one ought to be able to merely tell the browser or operating system how to handle this type of link.

And the odds are you are not using these links anyway.

The solution for my user was to remove Skype Click-to-Call from their system.  This brought back the expected paste options throughout Office.  If they need to make a call from a phone number they find on-line they can probably still just click on the link.  If that fails, it’s only ten digits: type it into Skype directly—or just copy and paste it into Skype.

Removing Skype Click-to-Call will not effect the normal operation of Skype for textual, voice, or video chat.  I don’t know when they added it, but you don’t need it.

Hope that helps you.  Have fun.

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5 thoughts on “Call-to-Click Breaks Unrelated Functions

  1. I must correct you there’s almost never link to phone numbers here, ex to call the white house
    it is these kinds of examples that skype automatically makes a telephone link
    http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/write-or-call#call

    or if for example you are looking for someone’s phone number in the U.S.
    like this page http://www.whitepages.com/
    but there is one drawback to skype click to call and that is that chrome becomes unstable and slow. I suspect a bug

    purpose of the service is easy to call a regular phone / regular phone numbers
    the idea is good
    but fix the problem with chrome

    1. You may be correct, but either way the plug-in stands in conflict with MS Office and must be removed to fix the conflict. And since a user can just copy and paste the telephone number into Skype directly I don’t suppose that’s really much of a loss.

  2. It’s a great app that recognizes phone numbers and makes calling them super easy. Unfortunately, like other people have mentioned, it’s buggy as hell, at least with Chrome and causes all sorts of problems. I re-installed it today hoping Skype had fixed the bugs, but it’s still causing problems.

    1. Yeah, I found conflicts with Outlook. It’s really not that interesting to me. It’s easy enough to just copy and paste the telephone number (instead of clicking an href link with a tel argument).

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