Hi, Michael.

Firstly, I would like to sincerely apologize for the delayed response as we have been experiencing an unusually high number of tickets. I am sorry that it has taken longer than usual to respond to your concern and your patience is highly appreciated.

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Yes, we currently do not have any kind of placeholder like that.

You can make a development suggestion, but i honestly can't say a realistic ETA if a placeholder like that might be made in the near future.

Please feel free to search on our suggestions page, 

 to see if someone may be already suggested this feature. If you can't see it, feel free to add your suggestion there,  and as more people vote, the feature will move higher on the priority list.

You can certainly follow our changeLog page if you'd like ( it is also available in the plugin dashboard), where we state any changes/new features/bug fixes during updates;

and our newsletter, so you're informed about new features, bug fixes, freebies, etc.

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The only way to make a use-case like this with out plugin's built-in options/features will be to alter your SQL Query, as you mentioned,

and to add an SQL CONCAT function, which will allow you to add parts of strings combined with pulling the actual dynamic cell data from your database.

So, for example, if all your cells of this custom column would start in the same way, with the same prefix of the number,

like with the "a href" HTML attribute, you could start the CONCAT with

<a href="tel:+49

then you would concatenate the table.column value  with your column that holds the simple version of the phone number like "09123456789" 

and concatenate the ending of the a href tag "</a>".

You can see more about basics of SQL CONCAT here; ( if you already know that, my apologies)

and you can see our Video example here, where we use SQL CONCAT in on of our tables to make a custom dynamic link with Map parameters.

Let us know if that helps.