I have been creating few puzzle but I found it to tough to create puzzle image. I have been using Excel sheets to create puzzle images which is not very efficient.

There is many other tools which can be used for creating puzzle images. Here I am mentioning some of them

1. EPS (Below is link to the tutorial and basic information by Deb)
http://www.wpcstylepuzzles.com/2010/12/learning-eps-encapsulated-po...

2. Thanks to Tom Collyer Yesterday I got to know about inkscape (http://inkscape.org/)
Here is link to templates which Tom Collyer has created for different puzzle type
http://www.warwick.ac.uk/~marear/templates/

I want to learn at least one of tool for creating puzzle images. There may be other tools also available. Please do share your experience of these tools for creating puzzle images.

I use only CorelDRAW to create puzzle images for publishing. And "prototypes" are made in Excel, of course.
CorelDRAW is a friendly, efficient tool, but maybe not very easy to be learned from scratch.
I cannot tell anything about the other tools as I never used them.

I work with several authors, and it is always interesting for me to know how they make puzzle images.

Apart from InkScape and CorelDraw, I know that Serkan uses Adobe Freehand and some authors use the expensive Adobe Illustrator. Having used bit of everything, I would say that there is not much to choose between these. All of them produce beautiful vector based images. However, learning them and using them efficiently is not easy. So if you are starting to learn (or planning to use) one of them, just pick one and get started. If I were to ditch EPS and start using another tool, I would choose InkScape because it is free and there are lot of tutorials available (because it is free).

I'm using eps for a long time now, which I learnt from Hendrik. I have to write PostScript program for each image type, so it demands good amount of programming skills. I would not recommend eps to everyone. Unlike most modern languages, PS uses Reverse Polish notation and not Infix notation. That can still be a challenge even for experienced programmers.

I use a homemade program written in Python, which has enough editing capabilities that a lot of puzzles I make never appear on a sheet of paper. wxWidgets does the GUI and also used to do the drawing until I changed to Cairo in a rewrite to get vector graphics. It does have its limitations, mostly when the grid is irregular. I've had intentions to clean it up enough to be released for over a year, but it seems like every time I strike something off the todo list, two more things take its place.

A screenshot of the program to give an impression of how it works: http://mellowmelon.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/screenshot.png
Should be noted that one major item on the aforementioned todo list is a revised interface made to be intuitive for someone other than me, not to mention documentation.

I know CorelDraw is very effective to use for doing that, but Adobe programs are more understandable to me, maybe because I am more accustomed to them, so I still prefer to work with Adobe Software.

My workflow uses 3 (technically 4) pieces of software and two devices:

Step 1: Draft the puzzle by hand in Sketchbook for iPad, export as PNG to Dropbox
Step 2: Draw nicely using Inkscape on my PC, save editable SVG and PDF copy for posting, save PDF to Dropbox
Step 3: Test-solve the PDF version in UPAD for iPad, checking for errors and comparing against the original drawing when errors are found.