Every entry-level office job description in the country contains some version of the same sentence: "Proficient in MS Office and/or Google Workspace." Most applicants claim it; few can prove it. This module is where you earn the right to claim it — not by memorizing menus, but by producing three artifacts you could show in an interview: a professionally controlled document, a self-computing payroll sheet, and a presentation deck built on a proper template.

Unit 1.1 — Collaborative Document Processing

Path A: Google Docs · Path B: Microsoft Word · ~10 hours

1. The Scenario: The Contract That Fought Back

It's Monday morning at KANRAUL Builders. HR assistant Catherine has been asked to prepare employment contracts for twelve newly hired site personnel, plus a shift-modification memo for the security team. He has a contract file inherited from his predecessor — and it is a disaster. The dates are in three different fonts. Someone once fixed a margin by pressing the spacebar forty times. Worse: last month, a new hire edited his own contract before signing it, changing the probation period from six months to three — and nobody noticed until the signed copy reached the general manager.

Meanwhile, the memo has to be reviewed by two department heads before release, and the last time Catherine emailed a memo around for comments, he got back three conflicting copies named memo_FINAL.docx, memo_FINAL2.docx, and memo_FINAL_revised_USE THIS ONE.docx.

Catherine doesn't have a typing problem. He has a document control problem — and document control is what this unit teaches.

2. The Theoretical Core: Documents Are Processes, Not Papers

A workplace document has a lifecycle: someone drafts it, others review it, someone approves it, and then it must be protected so the approved version stays approved. Word processors are built around this lifecycle, and the features that matter in an office are exactly the ones that manage it:

• Structure over decoration. Professional documents are formatted with styles (named designs like "Heading 1" or "Body Text" applied consistently), not by manually bolding and resizing each line. Styles make a 30-page document consistent in seconds and are what make automatic tables of contents possible.
• Review without chaos. Instead of emailing copies, modern documents live in one shared file where reviewers propose changes that the owner accepts or rejects. One file, one history, no FINAL_v2_USE THIS ONE.
• Protection of the approved version. A finished contract should be impossible to alter casually. Both ecosystems can restrict a document so others can only fill in designated blanks, only suggest, or only read.
• Scale through automation. Twelve contracts differing only in name, position, and salary should not be typed twelve times. Mail merge generates all twelve from one template plus one list.

Everything below is these four ideas, twice — once per ecosystem.

3. Step-by-Step: Path A — Google Docs

A1. One file, shared properly. Upload or create the memo in Google Docs. Click Share (top right). Under General access, resist the temptation of "Anyone with the link can edit" — instead add the two department heads by email and set their role to Commenter or Editor depending on trust. The golden rule: the narrowest access that lets the person do their job. (Remember this rule — it returns in Module 3 as a security principle.)

A2. Suggesting mode — the polite pencil. Reviewers should click the pencil icon (top right, below Share) and switch from Editing to Suggesting. Now every change they make appears as a colored proposal with a strikethrough of the original — nothing is destroyed. Miguel, as owner, walks through each suggestion and clicks ✓ (accept) or ✗ (reject). The document converges instead of forking.

A3. Assigning tasks inside the document. Highlight the paragraph in question, click the comment icon, and type @ followed by a colleague's email — e.g., @engineering head — please confirm the new shift hours before Friday. Tick Assign to. That person now gets an email and a task attached to that exact paragraph. This replaces the vague group-chat message "pakicheck yung memo" with an accountable, located request.

A4. Version history — the time machine. File > Version history > See version history shows every state the document has passed through, with authorship colored per person. Name the important milestones (File > Version history > Name current version: e.g., "Approved by GM — July 15") so the approved state is one click away forever.

A5. Protecting the contract. Google Docs' protection is coarser than Word's: your main tools are role control (give the new hire Viewer access only, never Editor), and for signing, export the final contract to PDF (File > Download > PDF document) — the version that leaves your hands should be the version that can't be edited at all.

4. Step-by-Step: Path B — Microsoft Word

B1. Styles: format once, apply everywhere. On the Home tab, the Styles gallery holds named designs. Select your section headings and click Heading 1; body paragraphs get Normal. To change how all headings look, don't touch the text — right-click the style in the gallery > Modify. One edit, whole document updated. This is also what powers References > Table of Contents, which builds and renumbers itself.

B2. Track Changes: the review contract. On the Review tab, turn on Track Changes before sending the memo out. Every reviewer edit is now recorded as a marked-up proposal with the reviewer's name. When the copies come back, use Review > Compare/Combine if people worked separately — or better, put the file on OneDrive/SharePoint and co-author one copy, which gives you the same one-file workflow as Google Docs.

B3. Restricting the contract — the feature that saves Miguel. This is the direct fix for the self-edited probation period. With the contract finished:

1. Go to the Review tab > Restrict Editing (older versions: File > Info > Protect Document).
2. Tick "Allow only this type of editing in the document" and choose Filling in forms (if the contract uses form fields for name/date/signature) or No changes (Read only).
3. Click Yes, Start Enforcing Protection and set a password the signer does not have.

The new hire can now read the contract and fill only the blanks you designated — the probation clause is untouchable.

B4. Mail Merge: twelve contracts from one template. Build a small table (in Excel or Word) with columns: Name, Position, Daily_Rate, Start_Date — one row per new hire. Then in the contract template: Mailings tab > Start Mail Merge > Letters, then Select Recipients > Use an Existing List and point to your table. Place Insert Merge Field wherever a personalized value belongs (e.g., «Name», «Position»). Click Finish & Merge > Edit Individual Documents — Word generates all twelve contracts in one pass, each personalized, none hand-typed, zero copy-paste errors in salaries. In a real HR office this single skill saves entire afternoons.

5. AI Prompts Integration: Drafting the Memo

AI assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot built into Word/Docs) are excellent at producing the first draft of routine documents — the draft you then verify and edit. Try this prompt for Miguel's memo:

You are an HR officer at a construction company in the Philippines.
Draft a one-page inter-office memorandum informing the security team
of a shift modification: from three 8-hour shifts to two 12-hour
shifts, effective August 1, with a rest-day rotation to keep weekly
hours compliant with the Labor Code.
Tone: professional and considerate — this affects people's schedules.
Structure: TO / FROM / DATE / SUBJECT header, purpose paragraph,
details in a table, effectivity date, and an invitation to raise
concerns with HR before July 25.
Leave placeholders like [DEPARTMENT HEAD NAME] for anything you
don't know. Do not invent specific legal citations.

Note what the prompt does: it assigns a role, gives context, states the task, and sets constraints — including ordering the AI not to invent legal citations. (Module 2 turns this Role–Context–Task–Constraint pattern into a full method.) When the draft comes back, you verify the shift math, the dates, and any legal claim before it goes anywhere. The AI drafts; Miguel decides.

6. Hands-On Lab 1.1: The Contract & Memo Package

7. Review Questions

Unit 1.2 — Data Management & Analytics

Path A: Google Sheets · Path B: Microsoft Excel · ~12 hours

1. The Scenario: Fifteen Days, Two Hundred Time Stamps, One Headache

Aira is the payroll clerk whose contract you merged in Unit 1.1 — her first big task has arrived. KANRAUL Builders runs a 15-day payroll cycle, and the biometric machine at the site entrance has just exported its log: hundreds of rows of employee IDs and time-in/time-out stamps. Company policy: work starts at 8:00 AM, and lateness is deducted proportionally from the daily rate.

The previous clerk did this with a calculator and a printout. It took her two full days per cutoff, and last cycle she deducted the wrong amount from a foreman's pay — he was not pleased. Aira has fifteen days of data, dozens of employees, and a general manager who wants the payroll summary by employee and by crew, not as a wall of raw stamps.

Aira doesn't need to compute payroll. She needs to build a machine that computes payroll — a spreadsheet that turns raw biometric data into finished pay figures automatically, this cutoff and every cutoff after it.

2. The Theoretical Core: A Spreadsheet Is a Model, Not a Table

The single most important mental shift in this unit: stop thinking of a spreadsheet as paper with a grid, and start thinking of it as a working model of your office's rules.

• Cells hold either data or logic. Data is what happened (time-in: 8:17). Logic is company policy expressed as a formula (minutes late × per-minute rate). Keep them separate: raw data on one sheet, computations on another, reference values (rates, thresholds) on a third. When policy changes, you edit one cell, not two hundred.
• References make formulas reusable. A formula written once with relative references (B2) fills down two hundred rows in one drag. An absolute reference ($B$2) pins a formula to one fixed cell — like the cell holding the official start time. Mastering when to pin and when not to is 80% of spreadsheet fluency.
• Lookups connect tables. The biometric log knows employee IDs; the salary table knows rates. Lookup functions (VLOOKUP, its modern successor XLOOKUP) join them, so nobody ever retypes a rate next to a time stamp.
• Summaries should be generated, not assembled. "Total late minutes per employee per crew" is not a task — it's a PivotTable, produced in four clicks and refreshed when data changes.

Garbage in, garbage out still applies: a payroll engine built on mistyped stamps produces confident nonsense. That's why the lab includes validation.

3. Step-by-Step: Path A — Google Sheets

A1. Structure the workbook. Create three sheets (tabs at the bottom): Log (paste the biometric export: Employee ID, Date, Time In, Time Out), Rates (one row per employee: ID, Name, Crew, Daily Rate), and Payroll (where logic lives).

A2. Flag lateness with a formula. In Payroll, compute minutes late against the 8:00 start:

=MAX(0, (C2 - TIME(8,0,0)) * 24 * 60)

TIME(8,0,0) is 8:00 AM; subtracting times gives a fraction of a day, so × 24 × 60 converts it to minutes; MAX(0, …) ensures early birds get zero, not negative lateness. Fill down once; done for all rows.

A3. Conditional formatting — make problems visible. Select the minutes-late column, then Format > Conditional formatting. Rule: Greater than 0 → red fill. Add a second rule on the Time In column: Is empty → orange (missing stamp — investigate before paying!). Aira can now see every exception at a glance instead of hunting for it.

A4. IMPORTHTML — live data from the web. Sheets can pull public tables straight from a webpage. For example, to pull a table of Philippine public holidays into a Holidays sheet:

=IMPORTHTML("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_holidays_in_the_Philippines", "table", 1)

The function fetches table #1 from that page and keeps it refreshable. Treat imported data as a draft — verify against the official proclamation before paying holiday premiums; a webpage is a convenience, not an authority.

A5. Sharing the result. Share the finished payroll sheet with the GM as Viewer and with the HR head as Commenter — the Unit 1.1 golden rule (narrowest access that does the job) applies doubly to a file full of salaries. (And in Module 3 you'll learn why a payroll sheet must never be "Anyone with the link.")

4. Step-by-Step: Path B — Microsoft Excel

B1. Same structure, stronger engine. Recreate the three-sheet structure. Excel is the corporate standard for exactly this kind of work, and two tools give it the edge here: mature lookups and PivotTables.

B2. Nested IF — encode the attendance policy. One formula can classify each day:

=IF(C2="", "ABSENT", IF(C2<=TIME(8,0,0), "ON TIME", "LATE"))

Read it inside-out: if there's no stamp → ABSENT; else if the stamp is at or before 8:00 → ON TIME; else → LATE. Nested IFs are how offices encode multi-step rules — but if you find yourself nesting five levels deep, that's a sign the rule belongs in a lookup table instead.

B3. XLOOKUP — join the rate to the stamp. In the payroll sheet, pull each employee's daily rate from the Rates sheet:

=XLOOKUP(A2, Rates!A:A, Rates!D:D)

("Find this row's employee ID in the Rates ID column; return the matching Daily Rate.") You will still meet VLOOKUP everywhere in offices — same idea with more constraints (it can only look rightward, and it silently breaks when columns are inserted, which is why XLOOKUP replaced it). Learn to read VLOOKUP, but write XLOOKUP where available. The deduction is then simply:

=ROUND(MinutesLate * (DailyRate / 480), 2)

(480 = minutes in an 8-hour day; per-minute rate × minutes late.) Net daily pay: rate minus deduction. Fifteen days, all employees, zero calculator.

B4. PivotTable — the GM's summary in four clicks. Click anywhere in your payroll data, then Insert > PivotTable. In the field list, drag Crew and Name to Rows, and Minutes Late and Net Pay to Values (set Minutes Late to Sum). You now have the per-employee, per-crew summary the GM asked for — and when next cutoff's data arrives, right-click > Refresh rebuilds it. This is the most interview-impressive skill in Module 1: summaries that generate themselves.

5. AI Prompts Integration: The Formula You Can't Quite Write

AI assistants are genuinely good at spreadsheet formulas — if you describe the sheet precisely and test what comes back:

You are a spreadsheet expert. In Excel, column C holds employee
time-in as a time value (blank if absent), cell references: work
starts 08:00, daily rate is in column F, an 8-hour day is 480
minutes. Write one formula for column G that returns the late
deduction in pesos, rounded to 2 decimals, returning 0 if the
employee is on time and the FULL daily rate if column C is blank
(absent, no-pay). Explain the formula part by part so I can
verify it.

Two habits make this safe: "explain it part by part" (so you understand what you're pasting into a payroll file), and testing with known values — feed it an 8:17 time-in at ₱600/day and check by hand: 17 minutes × ₱1.25 = ₱21.25. If the formula and your calculator disagree, the formula is wrong until proven otherwise. Never paste a formula you can't explain into a sheet that pays people.

6. Hands-On Lab 1.2: The 15-Day Payroll Engine

7. Review Questions

Unit 1.3 — Visual Communications & Presentations

Path A: Google Slides & Canva · Path B: Microsoft PowerPoint · ~8 hours

1. The Scenario: Death by Bullet Points

KANRAUL Builders is renewing its ISO 9001:2015 quality-management certification, and safety officer Dario must brief management on the training updates: who's certified, what changed in procedures, and the schedule for this quarter's toolbox talks. Last year's briefing deck was forty slides of size-11 bullet points pasted from a Word file. Five minutes in, the GM was answering emails; the one number that mattered — six site personnel with expiring safety credentials — was buried on slide 33 and nobody saw it.

This year, Dario gets one shot and twenty minutes. The information hasn't changed. The communication has to.

2. The Theoretical Core: Slides Support a Speaker — They Are Not the Document

A presentation and a report are different species. A report is read alone and must be complete; a slide is glanced at for seconds while someone talks, and must be instant. Three rules follow:

• One idea per slide. If a slide needs a paragraph, it's a report page in disguise. The headline should state the point ("6 safety credentials expire in August"), not the topic ("Credential Status Update").
• Consistency comes from the template, not from discipline. Fonts, colors, logo placement, and footer live in the theme/master — the design layer behind every slide. Fix it once there, and forty slides obey. Fix it slide-by-slide, and slide 27 will always betray you.
• Data slides show the shape, not the spreadsheet. Management doesn't need Aira's 200-row payroll grid on screen — they need the one chart that says "late minutes dropped 40% after the shuttle service started." Bring the chart; keep the workbook as backup.

And a workplace-specific rule: decks get reused. Build them so that next quarter's version means updating numbers, not redesigning slides.

3. Step-by-Step: Path A — Google Slides & Canva

A1. Set the theme before the content. In a new Google Slides file: Slide > Edit theme. This opens the theme editor — the "parent" slides that control all the rest. Put the KANRAUL logo, company colors, and footer text here, on the layouts, not on individual slides. Close the editor; every new slide inherits the design.

A2. Build on layouts, not blank slides. When adding slides, right-click > Apply layout and pick the fitting one (Title + body, Section header, One big number). Fighting the layout with floating text boxes is how decks become misaligned patchwork.

A3. Collaborate like a document. Slides shares the whole Unit 1.1 toolkit: Share with roles, comments with @-assignments ("@ HR head — confirm the training dates on this slide"), and version history. A deck reviewed inside the file beats a deck emailed as deck_FINAL_v3.pptx.

A4. Canva for the visual layer. Canva's strength is speed to a polished look: pick a professional template, apply your Brand Kit (logo + colors + fonts, set once under Brand), and use its diagram/icon library for things like a certification-process flow. Two workplace cautions: check that a template's look fits a management briefing (not a birthday poster), and when the office requires PowerPoint format, export via Share > Download > PPTX — then open and check it, because fancy fonts and animations don't always survive the trip.

4. Step-by-Step: Path B — Microsoft PowerPoint

B1. Slide Master — the template, properly. View > Slide Master opens the design layer: the big master slide on top controls global fonts/colors; the layouts beneath it control each slide type. Put the logo, footer, and ISO document-control code (quality-system habit!) on the master. Close Master View. From now on, Home > New Slide offers your branded layouts, and a company-wide font change is a one-place edit.

B2. Designer — AI layout suggestions. As you add content, PowerPoint Designer (right pane, or Design > Designer) proposes layout treatments — turning a plain list into a visual timeline or an icon grid. Use it as a starting point and keep the suggestion only if it clarifies the idea; decline anything that decorates at the cost of readability. (Same rule as every AI in this book: it proposes, you decide.)

B3. Embedding the live spreadsheet. Dario's credential-expiry table lives in Excel and changes monthly. Don't retype it. In Excel, copy the chart or range; in PowerPoint, Home > Paste > Paste Special > Paste link (Microsoft Excel Object). The slide now displays the data connected to the workbook — next quarter, update Excel, and the deck follows (PowerPoint will offer to refresh links on open). One caution for links: if the deck travels to someone without access to the workbook, the link breaks — for outbound copies, paste as a static picture instead. Live links are for your recurring deck; static paste is for the version you send away.

B4. Present like it's twenty minutes — because it is. Slide Show > Rehearse Timings tells you the honest length. Put the six expiring credentials on slide 2, not slide 33: in workplace briefings, lead with the decision you need ("approve the August recertification budget"), then support it.

5. AI Prompts Integration: From Blank Deck to Draft Outline

The hardest slide is the first one. Let AI break the blank page — at the outline level, where its mistakes are cheap:

You are a corporate communications specialist. Create a slide-by-slide
outline (max 12 slides) for a 20-minute management briefing at a
construction company on ISO 9001:2015 training updates. Must cover:
6 personnel with safety credentials expiring in August, updated
document-control procedure, Q3 toolbox-talk schedule, and a budget
approval request for recertification. Lead with the decision needed.
For each slide give: a headline that states a point (not a topic),
max 3 supporting bullets, and a suggested visual. Audience: busy
executives. Do not write paragraphs.

The outline comes back in seconds; Dario's judgment then does what AI can't — checks that every claim matches the real training records, and cuts anything the GM doesn't need. The deck's facts come from the office, never from the model.

6. Hands-On Lab 1.3: The ISO Briefing Deck

7. Review Questions