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Since I am working at home I needed to find the office tools, from the word processor to the telephone, but luckily I am not really bound by any corporate policies, so I can pick whatever works best for me – both in usability and price – without any problem.

First of all, documents and spreadsheets are really a must for every office job now, so I first had to tackle this. As I work on more than one computer – a desktop PC, an MSI laptop and an Acer netbook – I needed a solution that allows me to reach the same documents from each PC – not to mention from other people’s pc’s if needed. For this reason I checked out two online office solutions, Google and Zoho. Of course, you can’t have internet all the time, so I have OpenOffice installed too – mainly for the price, MS Office is way better, but way more expensive too – for that case.

For the online solution I have picked Zoho, mainly because Zoho Business offers much more than google, including a desktop where you can add any web application you want to, and have a starting point when you work.

The whole suite is completely free, except for a few applications (like the CRM, Project and Invoice) where it is free up until an amount of data, then it switches into paying mode. But not too expensive even then.

For timetracking purposes I use timeXchange right now – Zoho Project has a timesheet, timetrack feature that you should use if you use Zoho Project – but I still did not decide if I go with timeXchange or Easy Time Tracking – the latter is an offline desktop application.

To follow my projects, contacts, companies, tasks and such I use Norada’s Jobblogs solution, which is also free except for more advanced group and e-mail features.

For the presentations I am experimenting with Prezi, the new “you must see this one” web app – not sold on it yet, but it looks interesting.

And then of course Skype for the telephone – a separate phone number for work, voicemail, and free call to landlines all over the world for 10EUR is too good an offer.

So this is it so far. If you have some other ideas, or a pet website, or any other comment, please let me know. I like to try new things.

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