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I'm writing my thesis and I need to change the way Word is displaying page numbers using IEEE reference style.

Word is set to my native language and I have the language pack installed. For now, it is showing [1, p. 52], and it should be [1, str. 52]. Is there a way to change that?

I was always writing these things manually, but now I have a lot of references so I want to use the manager.

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Microsoft uses XSL Transforms to build the Citations and Bibliographies in Word. For IEEE, the code I have on my machine is in a file called IEEE2006OfficeOnline.xsl. You will need to edit that file in a text editor such as Notepad.

But first, a bit of background.

First of all, changing that .xsl on your machine means that you will only see str. when you update the Citation text and Bibliography text on your machine. To get the same result on any other machine would require that the modified .xsl was installed on that machine too, i.e. you would have to change the behaviour of other people's copies of Word.

Normally when Word wants to generate a Citation text or Bibliography, it sends a number of named pieces of data in the local language so that the transform does not have to know the details of every language that Word supports. For example, one of the Page strings is called "PageShort" and would probably be p. in English and str. in your language.

Many of the bibliographic styles such as APA pick up these strings and use them to localize their output. But the IEEE .xsl does not - it just hardcodes the English language values "p." and "pp." for "Page" and "Pages".

Unfortunately I don't know why it does that (because it clearly includes localized text in other places). If it's actually the IEEE standard that says you should always use p. and pp. regardless of the document language, then Microsoft has done the right thing (and it's possible you would not be doing the right thing to change "p." to ".str". Or it may be that this is an old transform that hasn't been maintained properly and should really be modified to do localization better. I don't know.

But assuming you have the same .xsl as I have, you can edit it.

First you will need to locate it. On modern Windows systems you will probably find here:

X:\Users\[yourusername]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Bibliography\Style\IEEE2006OfficeOnline.xsl

e.g. if your main hard drive is "C" and your username is "xyz" you should look for:

C:\Users\xyz\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Bibliography\Style\IEEE2006OfficeOnline.xsl

You may find that some of these folders are hidden.

If you find that, make a copy of the file for safety. Then open it in a text editor and look for the text "pp." You should find three blocks of code that look something like this:

<xsl:variable name ="pages">
    <xsl:choose>
        <xsl:when test="contains($initValueOfPages, '-')">
            <xsl:value-of select="concat('pp. ',$initValueOfPages)"/>
        </xsl:when>
        <xsl:when test="contains($initValueOfPages, ',')">
            <xsl:value-of select="concat('pp. ',$initValueOfPages)"/>
        </xsl:when>
        <xsl:otherwise>
            <xsl:value-of select="concat('p. ',$initValueOfPages)"/>
        </xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
</xsl:variable>

In each block, change the "p." to "str." and "pp." to whatever the equivalent is in your language

Save the file. then update your citations/bibliography in the document. (You don't actually have to close Word while you are changing the .xsl but it is safer to do so).

If you find the .xsl in some other folder you may also find that you cannot save it back to disk. IN that case, you are either getting the .xsl from the wrong place or you're working with an older version of Word/Windows. If so, let us know which versions of Word and Windows you are using.

If you're actually using Mac, then the general idea is the same but again, the locations of the .xsl files may be different.

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