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Creator of free Adobe clones unveils open-source Microsoft Office Excel, PowerPoint, and Word replications — Autodesk tools and other subscription-based services may come next (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/opensource@lemmy.ml
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Brandon Thomas, developer of ArtCraft, a suite of open-source creative tools meant to replicate Adobe applications for free, has now announced apps to replace Microsoft Office tools such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, respectively, named GridCraft, DeckCraft, and WordCraft, that are created with Claude. Thomas has shared his new clones to ArtCraft GitHub, making them free for all to download.

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[–] 33 points 1 week ago (11 children)

Yeah, why would you waste time with these instead of Gimp, OpenOffice, etc? Except for the clicks.

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  • [–] 34 points 1 week ago*

    i assume this person is making a statement more than anything. but gimp is not an adobe alternative. affinity is but not gimp. but since this is an open source commjnity i should point out affinity is not open source

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  • [–] 20 points 1 week ago

    Yeah, there are already good alternatives for the office package. I don't see why anyone would use a slop version instead of them.

    I can't say anything about Photoshop and autodesk since I don't use them.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 week ago (4 children)

    You've obviously never used Photoshop or GIMP because if you have then you would immediately understand why. GIMP is a completely different experience, and its UX is far inferior to Photoshop. On top of that, anybody who is used to the workflow in Photoshop will have a very steep learning curve using GIMP.

    Believe it or not, but most people just want a tool that works for what they're trying to do. These apps have some bugs and rough edges still, but they're very much usable and make it trivial to switch for anybody who's used to Photoshop.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    The venn diagram of what GIMP does and what Photoshop does isn’t the singular circle people assume. I, too, loathed my time with GIMP wondering how it ever got so popular in the OSS community, but then you realize it’s kind of all they have so of course they’ll support it no matter what.

    I haven’t used it in years and based on that experience, I’m not rushing to try it again anytime soon. The UI felt like a UX designer’s prank on the world.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 week ago

    I've been using the recent versions of GIMP and it's surprisingly usable. Of course tools are a bit different and in different places compared to Photoshop, but that goes for any software.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 week ago

    Yeah, you should definitely try using it again - especially since the big 3.0 release.

    Menus and tool names/functions still do not map perfectly onto Photoshop's (it is its own thing after all, so why should it?), but it is a serious and sophisticated piece of software. Easily adequate for my professional reproduction work.

    I switched to it from Photoshop two or three years ago and had to spend a few hours watching tutorials and reading the manual to make the transition. But now there is hardly anything I can't do in GIMP at least as fast, easily and reliably as I could in Photoshop.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    Is OpenOffice still maintained?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 child)

    Is OpenOffice still maintained?

    The descendant of it called LibreOffice has been the well-maintained thing to use for the last 15 years.

    about OpenOffice:Sadly something called OpenOffice is also sort-of still maintained but should not be used under any circumstances. It has basically been a zombie project since Oracle bought Sun Microsystems in 2010 and (as the Apache OpenOffice wikipedia article explains) is not safe to use:

    Difficulties maintaining a sufficient number of active developers and code contributors to keep the project viable have persisted for several years. This has led to persistent problems providing timely fixes to security vulnerabilities since 2015. In March 2026, the Apache Security Team raised OpenOffice's security risk status to "red" due to unfixed vulnerabilities over 365 days old.

    There is a somewhat complicated history about why the fork from the old OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice was necessary and how/why something else called "Apache OpenOffice" came to exist after the fork; the tldr is that Larry Ellison is a real-life comic book villain so his companies strive to do the worst thing possible at every turn.

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