Hmmm. I never ever thought about PP and Word. I'm pretty savvy with those.

But yes, please -- UNLESS you are feeling like shit, and then all bets are off. I want you to take care of yourself.

I'll be experimenting too.

Open office 4.0 can be downloaded for free. I'm pretty sure Draw can do stuff that powerpoint cannot.

And (Not so much for strix as for ita !) to give you an idea of why these sites rock, I just went onto morguefile searched for: Ships (625 results) shoes 646 results sealing wax, cabages 16 results Kings 27 results Pigs 184 For sealing wax had to go to Stock.xchng to find 15 photos that were actually sealing wax (as opposed to leg wax). All legal. You would have to go elsewhere for pigs with wings. Still, given a pretty arbitrary Lewis Carroll based list I was able to get a large selection of examples of all but one. And all I found would be legal for commercial use without attribution -so you could make an ad without having to spoil the look with credits.

You can do a fair amount with PowerPoint. I've found Open Office Draw very useful with laying out photos to print at specific sizes and doing things like adding text. Google draw isn't too shabby either.

GIMP is definitely worth getting and playing around with to learn it, but it's not something for work that needs to get done right away. I've tried other free paint-type programs but I always come back to GIMP.

I've found Morguefile really useful too.

Taking notes, and as soon as I have my second cup o' joe, I'll be experimenting!

Y'all are the best!

Also pixlr.com, which is what I use when I teach "Websites on a Shoestring Budget" workshops.

Polgara, how does that compare to Photoshop Express?

Also, please stop encouraging people to make their own cheap websites! It'll be Geocities all over again!

::thinks warm thoughts about the animated under construction icon::

Oh no doubt Gimp is the most powerful free software in its class. In fact it is more powerful than a lot of expensive software in its class. It is just a shame that that it is a no compromise user hostile interface. Borderline between an app and a programming language. And not particularly intuitive or straightforward in either aspect. Note doubt after using it for a two or three hundred hours over a reasonably short period of time, you get to the point where you say "this isn't so hard. I don't know what everyone is bitching about." But I suspect you need a few hundred hours, at least two hours a day, no more than one day skipped between session, to get to that point. And probably better off without even as much time as that to forget stuff - 3 or more hours on it a day, with no more than one day off a week.

Props to them for providing much of (or more than) Photoshop's functionality for free (though it still opens my NEF files as thumbnails...) but why hide it? Usability nightmare.