How to edit MS Word .xsl style documents to remove parens

Question

I'm using Word 2017 and need to remove parentheses from my citations so instead of looking like "(Author, YYYY)" they look like "Author, YYYY". It's a book manuscript, so lots of citations, so I need something global. I don't want to do any of this manually.

My web search led me to these instructions which describe editing the APA.xsl file, which looks like exactly what I need. The Word 2017 equivalent appears to be APASixthEditionOfficeOnline.xsl. I made the edits in the link but my changes aren't having any affect. The file is in "..\Office16\Bibliography\Style" which I think is correct. As a test, I removed all of the .xsl files out of this folder and it didn't seem to have any affect, so I'm not surprised my edits aren't taking. I'm at a bit of a loss, so any advice is welcome.

Answer 1

Found my main problem. This site suggested I was editing the wrong files, and should be working in

 C:\Users\***\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Bibliography\Style\, where *** is your user name

The only other tweak was described here that MS Word 2013 onward uses StyleNameLocalized instead of StyleName (the original link I posted was great, but a bit out of date.)

Summarizing, the main steps for removing brackets in Word 2013+ is

1. Copy and rename the .xsl file (to preserve the original) in your C:\Users\ ... \Style folder
2. Search for the StyleNameLocalized tags and edit their values (there's lots, but you can just find the one you use).

E.g.,

<xsl:when test="b:StyleNameLocalized/b:Lcid='1033'">
    <xsl:text>APA</xsl:text>
</xsl:when>

becomes

<xsl:when test="b:StyleNameLocalized/b:Lcid='1033'">
    <xsl:text>APA No Brackets</xsl:text>
</xsl:when>

3. Per the original link, find and remove the two blocks that add the brackets:

open bracket block:

<xsl:if
test="msxsl:node-set($ListPopulatedWithMain)/b:Citation/b:FirstAuthor">
<xsl:call-template name="templ_prop_OpenBracket"/>
</xsl:if>

closed bracket block:

<xsl:if test="/b:Citation/b:LastAuthor">
<xsl:call-template name="templ_prop_CloseBracket"/>
</xsl:if>

You can then select the entire document and apply the new citation style