Jesse Matthews sat in his office with a puzzled look on his face. He had received a Word file from Ellen Linares, a report that was to be presented to upper management in the morning. Ellen’s e-mail message said, “The report is attached. Please let me know if everything is OK before I leave tonight.” The message had been sent at 2:45 p.m. It was now 6:15 p.m., and Jesse was just getting around to looking at Ellen’s attachment. He opened the Word file. Title page: check. Table of Contents: check. Introduction: check. Table one: uh-oh. Table one looked like a jumbled mess! Jesse clicked at various locations within the table, noticing that the formatting was haphazard and that the alignment was badly out of line. Table two looked worse. All of the pertinent information was there but all jumbled up in no apparent order. Jesse tried opening the file again, with the same results. The rest of the tables were in similar disarray. Ellen had left work at 5:00 p.m. Jesse tried her home phone, with no luck. He didn’t have her personal cell number. Jesse made a half-hearted attempt at reworking the tables using his word processor’s table functions but only made things worse. He chastised himself for not looking at the report sooner. He was due to present it at 8:00 the next morning, and that was the exact time Ellen came in to work. There would simply be no time for her to try to revise it or to try to recover her originally intended format. As software packages are updated, the way in which they process documents changes. Ellen had saved the file in an earlier format, although in the same software package, but her tables had slipped in transition. Without the original software version, and perhaps even the same computer on which it was produced, it was unlikely that the updated software could recover the orderly format Ellen originally created.

1.  What should Ellen have done in order to prevent this type of issue from arising?

2.  Now that the problem is Jesse’s, what do you suggest should be done?