At the moment if you say remove the authors name from citation, the whole document reformats and it can take a long time. Can this be removed when the automatic reformating is not ticked?
If you have CWYW off (instant formatting) and have converted the document to unformatted citations – so you are inserting the temporary citations {Author, Year #1234}, you can delete the authors name {, Year #1234} and, once formatted, the author will be omitted from the citation. If you prefer the Author (Year), style, it is a more complicated manual fix, {Author, 1991 #1234@@author-year} - and you can create a shortcut or autocorrect to accomplish this, although I find then you usually need to remove a space, so a macro may need to be created to finesse it.