How can I turn off animations in Ubuntu 13.10?

I'm having a problem with LibreOffice and Ubuntu 13.10. Namely, whenever I try to access different Calc spreadsheets by ctrl-clicking the Calc icon on the left toolbar, the system becomes completely unusable for several seconds while some animation of the windows rearranging themselves plays. I would like to either:

1. disable that animation entirely (apparently not allowed once Unity2D became merged with Unity)
2. be able to alt-tab between windows rather than between applications

Honestly, I have no desire to have a fancy 'lickable' interface; I don't want to use a Mac. How can I turn all of these helpful 'features' (ie, time-wasting animations) off?

Install Unity Tweak Tool:

sudo apt-get install unity-tweak-tool

Run Unity Tweak Tool and open the "General" settings under "Window Manager"

Then under "Animations" disable "Window Animations".

You can also use Alt+` (Alt + tilde) to switch between open windows of the same application.

I found this thread because the animations were too slow. I'm running Ubuntu on a virtualbox. Just in case this might help someone else, enabling 3D acceleration on my virtualbox settings made the animations smooth, and I didn't need to disable them anymore.