How to stop word docs reverting to old author summary properties

[AvB]

We were once part of a company who somehow entered author/ company details
onto many of their documents. The documents we now use, (7 years later!) have
in many cases been modified and re-saved many times from those earlier
documents.

The problem is that the previous company’s author and company details keep
re-appearing in the document properties, no matter how many times I manually
remove them. I can clear the details from the summary tab and that document’s
OK, but if I then open it and re-save it with a different name, the wrong
details re-appear! It’s very frustrating and embarrassing to send a document
to a client and our old company’s name (now our opposition!) is shown as the
author.

How can I permanently stop these docs referring back to the old details?

 

[Peter Jamieson]

The standard properties can be set in (at least) a couple of ways and you
need to check that none of them is happening:
a. are you sure that there are no VBA subroutines in the documents, or
their attached templates, or the Normal template, that might set these
values?
b. check that the document does not have an { AUTHOR } or { INFO AUTHOR }
field that sets the value to the original name, e.g.

{ AUTHOR "original name" } or { INFO AUTHOR "original name" }

(You can use Alt-F9 to toggle field code display so you can see this kind of
stuff). Some of the other buitin properties also have fields that can update
the value, but others do not).

In addition, if any of the properties being used are actually Custom
Document Properties, you would need to ensure that they are not "linked" to
a bookmark within the document.

Peter Jamieson