How can I get word to cite "et al." for a number of authors?

[sarnyg]

I'm using the Word 2007 Insert Citation tool but Word does not abbreviate to
et al when there is more than 2 authors as is custom. I can't seem to find
any help article on this either

 

[Yves Dhondt]

There is no setting in Word to change the number of authors which are shown
for a certain style.

The number of authors shown depends on the implementation of the style. The
good news is that those implementations are open and can be adjusted in any
way you want. The bad news is that they require you to have some knowledge
of xslt and look rather complicated if you have no idea what you are doing.

The style implementations can be found in
<path to winword.exe>\Bibliography\Style
On 32-bit systems, this commonly is
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Bibliography\Style

Information on how many authors should be shown is commonly (not always as
it depends on the style) stored in the template formatPersonsAuthor and its
dependencies.

Yves

 

[Peter T. Daniels]

And how to use "et al." can be very complicated -- if there are other
citations with the same first (several) authors, you have to list
enough of the authors to identify the work in question, and Word
doesn't compare citations for that sort of information.