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There is no open-source replacement for Excel or Photoshop.

Excel is the language/IDE in which many of the world's financial models are developed. Everyone I've heard from who's in a position to say something on the matter has indicated that it's virtually irreplaceable. It has many hidden features and tricks which cannot be replicated in OpenOffice Calc.

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Agreed, there's no replacement for Excel for financial modeling (except maybe ResolverOne, and that's more a migration than a drop in replacement).

However the big money these days is made by quants who use more complex, and more accurate, tools - in particular, R, SciPy/NumPy, and S.

Gimp is absolutely a replacement for Photoshop. Not necessarily adequate for professionals, but a replacement nonetheless.

If it doesn't produce prepress output, it isn't a replacement for Photoshop.

Lolcats and photographs of models changed to look like comic book superheroines are accidental use cases for Photoshop.

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