I find paper will work indoors if you scrape it up with a knife. You should get a mixture of dust and thin scraggly bits. The action is not to cut the paper but to scratch it. I've never used a fire-drill, but I gather that too works by first creating dust then igniting it. Toilet or tissue paper can be easier to work with. I suspect it is possible with a $1 bill or a £5 note, but I've not seriously tried it.

Vasaline is good once you have a flame, but I find it inhibits getting the flame from a spark. There has been talk here recently about candle-wax working as well as vasaline without being as messy.

Just to be clear, there are typically several stages to starting a fire:
(1) Something to make a spark, eg ferro rod or Sparklite.
(2) Something to turn the spark into a flame, eg cotton wool, paper dust.
(3) Something to keep the flame going for a few minutes, eg cotton wool+vasaline, wood curlings, paper
(4) Something to make the flame bigger - eg twigs about as thick as a pencil.

and then you have to work up to burning big logs if that is what you are going to do. (I'm glossing over the later stages but it's important in the wild to have your main fuel stacked up ready.) When people talk about "tinder" they may mean stage (3), but they may also mean stage (2), and although some materials can do both jobs they are. in my view, different.

A cigarette lighter combines stages (1) and (2), eg using flint and gas, but in my experience if you want to, eg, light a Esbit-style hex fuel tab then it still helps to have a stage (3). A lot of fuel needs to be exposed to flame for 20+ seconds, if not minutes if it is windy, before it will properly catch. With cotton wool + vasaline, or commercial equivalents like TinderQuik, the cotton wool is providing stage (2) and the vasaline is providing stage (3) - in stage (3) the wool is acting like a candle wick and the vasaline is what is actually burning. A Trianga-style alcohol stove is unusual in that the fumes from the liquid can provide stage (2) and that's all you need to keep it burning, so you just need a spark and no other tinder.

With a fire-drill, stage (1) isn't a spark but the heat of friction. With a fire-piston, the initial heat comes from compression. I acquired a fire piston recently but haven't played with it much yet - it produces a red ember and you still have to turn the ember into an actual flame.