IEEE Referencing with Office 2007

Almost every work term, I have to write a large technical report for the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Waterloo investigating a problem I encountered on that work term. I won’t go in to the details, but needless to say, it’s always a lot of hassle and quite a bit of work to write a report that meets all of the predefined requirements, all of which are pretty strict and most of which are usually part of the so-called “fine points department”.

After upgrading to Microsoft Office 2007, I discovered the awesome new bibliography tools for writing reports and essays with Office ’07. It’ll do APA, MLA, Chicago, and a bunch of other referencing styles for you, without any fuss or remembering whether a title is italicized or quoted. For everything but the IEEE referencing styles, that is.

Since that clearly wouldn’t do, I decided to modify one of the built in styles to do IEEE referencing for me. A bunch of XSL transforms later, and Office 2007 was put to work managing references for me. As it was such a time saver for me this past term, I’m providing the modified file for everyone to use as they see fit.

IEEE.XSL: Office 2007 Stylesheet for IEEE Referencing

NB: I only implemented the parts of the IEEE standard I was using, so the file only works for the office types Book, Book Section, Journal Article, and Web Site.

NB 2: Office 2007 doesn’t allow you to change the name displayed in the drop-down menu (at least, as far as I can tell), so this one shows up as ‘ISO 690: Numerical Reference’ . If you haven’t deleted the original ISO Numerical style, you’ll see this entry in the menu twice, the first of which is the IEEE style.

Installation is pretty easy — simply copy the IEEE.xsl file into the ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Bibliography\Style’ directory and restart Office!