Version Chaos and 1,200 Admission Letters
A district skill-training centre in Assam has six office staff working from one shared folder and a single desktop printer. Admission confirmation letters, 1,200 of them, must go out in nine days. The master list is an Excel workbook that three people edit; last week two staff saved different versions and one applicant's details were overwritten. Files in the folder are named 'final', 'final2', 'new final', and 'final correct'. The printer jams when more than 40 pages are sent at once. One staff member carries work home on a personal pen drive, and another has been emailing the workbook to a personal Gmail address to run mail merge at home. A local cyber café has offered to print the letters from a copy of the file. The centre coordinator wants the letters out on time and is unsure whether to allow the café.
1. Design a version-control and file-naming protocol that three editors can actually follow.
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Adopt one master workbook and one editor at a time. Rename the file with a date and version in a fixed format: ADM_MASTER_2025-07-14_v03.xlsx. Keep a read-only master in the shared drive; staff who need to work copy it, edit, and return it to a designated consolidator, who alone merges changes. Use a simple changelog tab listing date, editor, columns changed and rows affected. Lock the header row and the admission-number column, and use data validation for phone numbers, pincode and category so bad entries are rejected at entry. Delete 'final', 'final2' and 'final correct' after one reconciliation rather than leaving them to confuse. If the centre has Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, a single cloud workbook with edit history is better than email attachments. Set permissions: three editors, others view-only. The test is simple: at any moment, anyone should be able to say which file is authoritative and who last changed it.
2. Outline the mail-merge workflow, including checks that prevent wrong or duplicated letters.
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Mail merge needs a clean source, not a fast printer. First freeze the master and remove duplicates by application number. Build a separate merge sheet with only the required columns: name, guardian, address, programme, admission number and a checksum column. Normalise capitalisation, strip extra spaces, verify pincodes are six digits and phone numbers ten. Check that no field contains a line break that will split an address across pages. Do a test merge of 10 records, print one, and proofread the salutation, spacing and page breaks. Then merge to PDF first and check the page count equals the record count; only then print in batches of 25–30 to avoid jams, allowing the printer to cool. Keep the merge sheet and the PDF together for audit. Do not merge directly from the working file while others are editing it.
3. Should the centre allow the cyber café to print the letters? Explain your decision and the data-handling rules you would issue.
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Do not send the workbook to the cyber café. It contains names, addresses and phone numbers of applicants, possibly with category data; once copied, you lose control of it. If the café must be used, send only a print-ready PDF with no hidden columns, under a written confidentiality note, and have a staff member stay while it prints. Prefer in-house printing in batches, or a reputed shop with a simple agreement. For the personal pen drive and personal Gmail, issue a one-page rule: centre data stays on centre devices or the official cloud account; personal email and unencrypted drives are not permitted. Provide an alternative - an official shared-drive login and one encrypted drive signed out from the office. Check the staff member's reason; if home internet is the issue, a sanctioned remote login is safer than a Gmail workaround.