Dial

The Dial application was designed to be a small tool that will enable you to dial phone numbers from Windows shortcuts. Compile frequently used numbers into a folder and you can dial from the Start menu. Requires a modem and drives the standard Windows phone dialler.

Copy Dial.exe to somewhere convenient on your disk, for example the Program Files folder. Right-click the Start button and select Explore. Go to File / New / Folder and create a folder called Dial.

Inside that folder you can, if you desire, create sub-folders to categorise your shortcuts. Create a new shortcut by dragging Dial.exe into the folder using the RIGHT mouse button. When you drop the file, you get the option to create a new shortcut.

Press the [F2] key to rename the shortcut to the name of the person or company it will dial. After renaming, right-click the shortcut and select Properties.

Click in the Target field, and add a space and the phone number to the end of the line. Don't put any spaces within the number.

An example, where you have to dial 9 for an outside line:

"path_todial.exe" W9,0123456789 There is one more feature you may like to use. Using the shortcut fires up the Windows dialler utility and it's that program which actually does the calling. Some versions of this (Phone Dialer) create a log file of numbers they call. Get at it from Tools / Show Log. If you want to make use of this feature, you can have the person's name included alongside their phone number. Add it to the shortcut command line in square brackets as follows:

"path_todial.exe" 1234567 [John Jones] The text within square brackets will be picked up by Dial.exe and passed through to Phone Dialer which will include it in its log.