How does Office fetch its author information?

Question

How does Office fetch its author information?

Anonymous

Dearest forum,

I have a quick question regarding the ways in which Microsoft Office fetches names of "authors" that one can select when saving/setting the properties of a document.

When I tried to add myself as an author today (to a new document from scratch), I was surprised to discover tens of names I could have ticked as authors in the authors' list. These were all people I know and worked with at some point (including some of my university professors from >10 years ago!), but here's the thing: the computer is brand new, the Windows 10 account is a local, non-backed up account, and the Microsoft Office I have is not linked to any Microsoft account or institution. I have zero documents on this laptop (seeing as it's brand new), the Microsoft Office was a fresh install and so on.

How did Office find all these author names, and how did it automatically index them? At one point, I inserted my back-up drive with thousands of .docs, but didn't even open them (much less save them on the drive). Is it possible that Office automatically indexed them somehow?

Thanks a million!

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Answer 1

AFIK, the author names are picked up from here:

File menu > Options command > General option > Personalize Your Copy of MS Office section. The author name is picked up from the "User Name" field.

Oops, that appears to be old or maybe even incorrect information. I can't verify it either way.

In my Word 2016 I went to File menu > Info command.

On the right side of the pane, under "Properties" there is a list of fields and their information displayed. Near the bottom is the Author field. The name displayed is my Windows login name. There is a button to "Add an Author" that picks up additional author names from Outlook. In 2010 it picks the names from the "Global Address List".