Can you really not use a windows-formatted hard drive with Time Machine?

I still have people in my household that think Windows is the way to go, and so they have used all the hard drives to back up their stuff.
There is still a reasonable amount of room on one of the hard drives for me to do a Time Machine backup, however it is obviously formatted to Windows.
Is there ANY way the hard drive can be used with both systems?
It's a bit of a bummer if I have to shell out for a new one just for my MacBook!
Thanks

Do you mean you want to connect a USB drive to the TC?  If so, it will recognize a disk formatted in FAT32, but not ExFAT or NTFS.
If you mean you want a Windoze-like partition on the TC's internal HD, that's a bit trickier, since it can't be partitioned.  But you could create a disk image on it via Disk Utility, formatted MS-DOS (FAT) aka FAT32, or ExFAT  (I'm not entirely sure if ExFAT would work in a disk image there, but it might.)

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