I just removed my office suite since all traditional office suites are time absorbing monsters that reduce productivity to the max. That shouldn't be news for you, but here is a kind reminder. If you prefer to do less work in more time, please use an office suite that is able to create and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Please use them to create a document on your laptop and please use them to mail the document to your colleagues who can review it on their laptop making their changes in your document (off course with a 'Track-changes' functionality enabled) while working with their specific office suite and when they are finished, they mail your document with their changes to you so you can process their changes in your document. If you are lucky you will have some colleagues that will propose different changes on the same fragment, so you can mail them again, asking them to come to a consensus, wait for them, and than process the outcome of their little consensus in your nice document. This will look something like this:
Does this look a bit cumbersome? Yes it does! You are spending too much time on a sychronous commmunication and reworking documents containing changes of others. You are responsible for the master document and worst case, you might forget to process some change or you might even miss an email. I even let out all the issues you could have with different versions and types of office suites and different operating systems on which they are executed.
However there is light at the end of the tunnel, you could save humongous amount of time by using online services (SaaS) such as Google Docs, Zoho, Sliderocket, Gliffy and many others. Using these tools will enable you to be more effective in editing documents and collaborating with others. You can work synchronously with each other on a document and you do not have to have endless mailing sessions while reviewing each others documents. By being able to work synchonously you will save time, and your dependant on ones laptop where the master document is available. Besides that, it will save your licensing costs since most online solutions are free or require a small fee. And even better, you can edit your document always and from everywhere, the only thing you need to have is a browser and an internet connection. Using such tools will simplify above image to something like this:
Since you too want to save time here are some guides to uninstall the most common Office suites:
Off course if you would like to spend your life doing less work in more time, be my guest, however I think you could to better things with your time. Let's increase our productivity!
