Not all of us need, or want, $10,000 worth of Adobe and Microsoft software to be creative. So, here's some alternatives, each available on every major platform:

GIMP, for all your drawing and photo-editing needs. (Windows and OSX.)
Inkscape, for vector graphics creation.
Scribus, for incredibly powerful document creation.
FontForge, if you want to make your own fonts.
OpenOffice, the old standby for word processing, spreadsheets, and all those other office needs. [more inside]
posted by cthuljew on Feb 20, 2009 - 189 comments

Word 97 Users Abandoned by Microsoft? "Microsoft's flagship word processor has for years had a security flaw that could allow a criminal to steal computer files by "bugging" a document with a hidden code." Microsoft will fix the problem for newer versions of Word, but those of us who use Word 97 are more or less out of luck. As it turns out, the Microsoft Corporation page doesn't seem to have any easily accessible information on this issue.
posted by Joey Michaels on Sep 13, 2002 - 40 comments

Would the Mac platform collapse without Microsoft? BusinessWeek questions the conventional wisdom.
posted by kirkaracha on Aug 7, 2002 - 42 comments

Globe software just released globeProductive for Windows for an introductory price of $75. The software offers a basic office suite with a single file format. In addition, Sun has announced plans to aggressively market StarOffice 6 for $100 and reach out to foreign government agencies. Sun donated their product to the Chinese Ministry of Education for deployment in schools with the obvious benefits of growing your own loyal market by the millions. Neither of these packages includes an e-mail client at this time, but there is always Mulberry and Mozilla.
posted by KirkJobSluder on Mar 28, 2002 - 11 comments

Forbes.com suggests you IT people use shareware or freeware office packages instead of that expensive Microsoft stuff.
posted by jhiggy on May 2, 2001 - 14 comments

MacOS X comes of age. Microsoft has just announced that Microsoft Office will be released for the new Apple OS in the fall. "Analysts had warned that without a version of Office, or similar productivity suite, running natively under Mac OS X, Apple would face problems getting businesses to switch to the new operating system. "
posted by Brilliantcrank on Jan 10, 2001 - 0 comments