I see this problem all the time in our marketing department. I think Microsoft Office is the problem, and the solution is to move toward systems which support collaborative document editing like wikis.

One of my pet peeves is emailed Word documents that the author has no intention that the reader will print. I prefer to read most documents in a web browser. I consider Word documents (and PDFs) to be skeuomorphs from a time when the printed page was the only means to share information: http://baus.net/documents-are-skeuomorphic/

Word is convenient for the author, but not the reader. I suspect over time its use will diminish as better collaborative systems become the norm.