Office Productivity Tools

Looking for Simplicity on the far side of Complexity

Contents

Collaboration
Project Management
Communications
Content Creation and Resources

Collaboration with your Team

Collaborating with a distributed team requires good communications software, effective project management software, and an appropriate swag of tools for words, numbers and images

Office Suites

The means for working online exploded recently. There are so many tools that provide the means to share documents that we have a special page to discuss Collaboration for Office groups, remote teams, and ad-hoc groups.

There is a lot of cross-over with communications software. In the three office suites that we focus on, every one of them includes video conferencing and messaging tools.

Project Management Tools

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Dedicated project management tools will reduce the workload involved in managing the job processes and give you more time to bring your imagination and creativity to the task.

There is an enormous amount of cross-over between all of the software services we are presenting. The office suites include tools for project management (PM). The PM services include tools that are suitable for your office work. The difference lies in the extent of integration between all the different tools that you would use. There will still be a need for the content creation tools that an office suite provides, for example, general word processing, number crunching, and audio-visuals.

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All of these PMs will enable workflow automations and integrations with third-party tools

Dedicated PM tools integrate your communications with your calendars, charts, timelines, and so on. The integration reduces the amount of in-between work that you would otherwise have to do, such as flipping between spreadsheets and calendar, then flipping out to your email or messages to post to a group. This has two immediate benefits: first and most importantly, things don’t fall through the gaps. The next thing to-do becomes a button press, not a five or ten minute digression that breaks your flow. We’ve just alluded to the second thing. You will save a lot of time because so much of the incidental elements of the work occurs within the PM tool. You are not switching between tools. And because everything is in the PM tool, it’s able to make the connections that ease your workload.

PROS

Tightly integrated planning, execution, and communications

CON

If you aren’t familiar with the way they work, it can require some effort, and a change in thinking, and behaviour, to get the full benefits from a PM tool.

A few of the best, in alphabetical order

When you are making an appraisal the most important question is going to be whether it feels like it is the right thing for you. The tools that we have selected are all highly recommended. Each one brings a different style of working to the task. Choosing the one that feels right is important.

TIP Each offers a free account for individuals, some for teams.

Asana asana.com/
Use Asana to quickly capture tasks, to-dos, reminders, and ideas. Get updates from coworkers, organize tasks and projects for work, or manage your to-do list for the day. With Asana’s mobile app, you can stay on top of your work from anywhere.

Define efficient onboarding processes with Asana’s work management platform. You can define workflows for your own business needs, and have your entire team engaged automatically, via calendars, messages, to-do lists, and so on.

Asana is free for teams of up to 15 people.

Clickup clickup.com/teams/non-profit
ClickUp is an all-in-one project management platform that eliminates the need of using more than one tool for your organization’s workflow. ClickUp’s core purpose is to remove the frustrations, inefficiencies, and disconnect caused by the current project management ecosystem.

The platform allows deep modularity in the form of add-ons called ‘Clickups’, allowing rich customization for each team individually. Proprietary features such as Assigning Comments and mocking up images make it an incredibly effective tool for keeping everyone on the same page. ClickUp’s flagship feature lies in the three Dashboards: List, Box, and Board. Each Dashboard provides a fundamentally different way of viewing and managing tasks, making both high level and low level perspectives viable in one intuitive location.

Monday monday.com/

A collaborative platform designed to maximize your team’s efficiency, monday.com Work OS is the solution you need to achieve your business goals. With the flexibility of a spreadsheet and the power of an operating system, monday.com allows you to easily build custom workflows so your entire team is always aligned. So, your team will spend less time color-coding spreadsheets and reporting updates in sync-up meetings, and more time doing meaningful work

Trello trello.com/
Organize anything, together. Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, know what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process.

Zenkit zenkit.com
Zenkit is a collaborative platform for project management, database building and more. Follow your data through its entire lifecycle, from fluid brainstorming and research through to a structured system for collaborative use. Zenkit is the flexible workspace you can use to organize anything.

Zenkit lets you view and manipulate your data in multiple intuitive ways to gain deeper insight into your projects. Start with a simple list or Kanban board to plan your process, or switch to a table to input additional data and view analytics. Use it to build your own CRM, automated reporting system, or financial planner, or simply save your recipes and plan your holidays. Share your workspaces and assign tasks to your friends and colleagues, and view as much or as little data as you need at any moment. Zenkit helps you to intuitively focus on what’s important.

Communications

Every Office Suite that we discuss includes communication tools that allow video and messaging: Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, Zoho Connect. If your needs your beyond the limits of those tools, there is a lot to explore. There are so many great alternatives to Zoom zoom.us that are free.

Jitsi Meet jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/
Jitsi Meet is a fully encrypted, 100% open source video conferencing solution that you can use all day, every day, for free — with no account needed.

Discord discord.com
Get any community running with moderation tools and custom member access. Give members special powers, set up private channels, and more.

Element element.io
Element for communities boasts, “Free, unlimited use forever!” Talk to anyone, not just those in Element. Unlimited calls, video and messages. Create unlimited number of rooms. No room size limits.

Content Creation

The most common requirement was for an image editor, and everyone was using Canva (www.canva.com). There are other online image editors. We haven’t checked them all out, but if you are looking for other online image editors, start here: alternatives to Canva

Resources

Good resource libraries make it easy to find images to convey the appropriate message. There are a lot of different resources, you have plenty of choice.

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Always check the conditions for use. Free to use does not mean copyright free.

While they offer free use of their images, most creators retain the copyright over the work. The resource libraries usually do their best to support that by offering a “click-to-copy” dialog that contains the authors name and the website location. You simply paste that text into the web site or include it wherever you use the image. This makes attribution easy.

Icons

The Noun Project thenounproject.com
Flat Icon www.flaticon.com
Fork Awesome forkaweso.me
Tablericons tablericons.com

Font Library

Google fonts fonts.google.com

Office Productivity Tools

Collaboration with your Team

Office Suites

Project Management Tools

A few of the best, in alphabetical order

Communications

Content Creation

Resources

Photographic Resources

Encyclopaedic Archives

Vector Art

Icons

Font Library