In my experience, “People” columns display the person’s name (instead of email address) ONLY once they have logged in.
However, not all of my “People” will be logging in, but I still want to display their names (not email addresses) in the “People” column.
Is this possible?
Whenever I go to share the doc with someone (to get them into the “People” column at all), it does recognize their first + last name when I type it (I’m connected to the company’s Microsoft account), however once I click “Invite”, it reverts to displaying only their email address.
Hope this makes sense. 
its defaulting to User().Email
you need the formula person.Name
where person is the name of the column you are using
The column type “People” provides no option to add a .Name (or any kind of) formula to change how it displays its dropdown options.
However, your advice prompted me to add a relation column in my task table that connects to my Users table, which I can use for dropdown of employee names. From there, in my task table, I add a formula to my original People column that pulls in the related User from the Users table, which allows me to retain all the People column-type functionality (notifying when a user is added, things like that).
I guess that will do—thanks 