Welcome to digital scrapbooking and SSD!
I have MS Word 2003 and I can drag and drop the alphas from the digital scrapbooking kits into Word.
Yes, you do need special software to make digital scrapbooking layouts. That question (and a whole lot of others about digital scrapbooking) is answered
here on Penny Springmann's blog. She also has a group of
tutorials about how to do things in several of the popular software packages - including using QuickPages (which I think is what you're referring to as the custom layouts).