Notice
This article is based on materials publicly available as of July 14, 2026, including those from Hancom, the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and related sources. DANA NOTES commentary on South Korea’s document creation environment is also included.
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What This Article Covers
Microsoft Word is a document creation program widely used around the world.
However, when we look at the history of PC use in South Korea, we can find a somewhat distinctive pattern.
Even though Microsoft Word existed, Hancom’s “Hangul” was used for a long time as a leading document creation program in South Korea.
HWP is a representative document file format that has long been used in Hangul.
HWP files themselves may be unfamiliar outside South Korea, but Hangul is not at all unfamiliar to people in South Korea who have used PCs for a long time.
It was commonly encountered when writing school assignments, creating reports at work, and handling documents from public institutions.
For many South Korean users at the time, deciding whether to use Word or Hangul to create a document was not really something they needed to think about.
When they needed to create a document, they naturally opened Hangul.
For Calculations, It Was Excel; for Documents, It Was Hangul
South Korea’s past PC environment can be described very simply like this.
“For calculations, it was Excel; for documents, it was Hangul.”
Microsoft Excel was used to calculate numbers or organize data.
For documents such as reports, official documents, and school assignments, however, using Hangul was natural.
It was not that Microsoft products were not used. Excel was already a familiar work program.
Even so, the idea that document creation software also had to be standardized within the Microsoft Office product family was much weaker than it is today.
Hancom also explains that Hangul developed by reflecting the PC environment of South Korean users, presenting features such as table creation, Hanja handling, dictionaries, keyboard shortcuts, and document formats suited to Korean-style documents as major characteristics.
For South Korean users, Hangul was less a special program deliberately chosen to replace the foreign Microsoft Word and more a tool that was naturally used when creating documents.
A Generation Learned Document Creation with HWP
When PCs were becoming widely adopted, being proficient with document creation software was also considered an important computer skill.
South Korea also had a national technical qualification for word processing that directly assessed this ability.
The Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry began administering the Word Processor qualification examination in 1992. According to its 2022 materials, the cumulative number of people who had passed the qualification exceeded 6.05 million.
For people who created a lot of documents at the time, knowing how to use the program was not simply a matter of knowing where menus were located.
Frequently used tasks such as creating tables, adjusting paragraphs, and configuring pages were handled with keyboard shortcuts.
Once users moved beyond consciously thinking about each shortcut, their hands moved first.
Just as people who used DOS for a long time remembered frequently used commands, Hangul’s keyboard shortcuts became part of the working habits of long-time Hangul users.
The more documents someone created, the greater this difference became.
It was not simply a matter of reducing a few clicks. It affected the speed of the many document-related tasks repeated throughout the day.
The Problem Was That Those Shortcuts Did Not Work in Word
For someone accustomed to Hangul, moving to Microsoft Word did not end with simply installing a new program.
The keyboard shortcuts and document creation methods they had used in Hangul for years did not work the same way in Word.
They had to relearn familiar tasks such as creating tables, adjusting paragraphs, and configuring pages.
Moving the documents themselves was not always simple either.
In particular, when complex HWP documents were moved to Word or their contents were copied and pasted, tables, paragraphs, line breaks, fonts, and page layouts sometimes appeared differently from the original.
With simple text, this could be corrected.
But work reports containing many tables and formatting elements were a different matter.
After copying and pasting, it was sometimes faster to recreate the document from the beginning than to fix a document whose formatting had become distorted.
As a result, moving from Hangul to Word involved two types of switching costs at the same time.
- The cost of having to process existing HWP documents and formats again in a different environment
- The cost of users having to relearn the keyboard shortcuts and document creation methods they had used for years
For companies, this was not simply a matter of replacing one program.
They also had to consider the documents and formats already accumulated, as well as the proficiency of the employees who used them.
Widespread Use and a Software Company Making Money Were Different Matters
Interestingly, the widespread use of Hangul did not mean that Hancom always grew steadily.
In the 1990s, software piracy was a serious problem.
According to the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, Hancom faced the burden of business diversification, widespread software piracy, and the 1997 Asian financial crisis, eventually experiencing its first default in 1998.
In June 1998, Hancom ultimately agreed to withdraw from the Hangul business in exchange for financial support from Microsoft.
However, after this news became public, the “Hangul Protection Movement Headquarters” was formed, and in July of the same year, Hancom decided to accept investment support from other sources and terminated its agreement with Microsoft.
This event shows more than just the financial crisis of a software company.
It also shows that Hangul had already become deeply embedded in the document creation environment of many users, to the point that the possibility of its disappearance became a matter of public discussion.
Another change also emerged during this process.
The movement to preserve Hangul expanded into the issue of using legitimate software. According to records from the time, the government and public institutions subsequently expanded purchases of licensed software and strengthened enforcement against software piracy.
What matters here is that this does not mean the government officially designated HWP as its new document creation program at that time.
There was already a broad base of organizations and users using Hangul, and the events of 1998 became an opportunity to reduce software piracy and expand licensed purchases within that existing environment.
Documents Do Not Change Easily in Public Institutions
Individuals can switch the programs they use relatively quickly when a newer program is more convenient.
An organization’s document environment is different.
Public institutions in particular accumulate existing reports, official documents, various forms, and document templates over many years.
And documents do not exist only within document creation software.
They are connected to other systems such as electronic approval systems, document management systems, and work portals.
Therefore, changing an existing document format requires more than changing how new documents are created. The issue of reopening and using past documents must also be addressed.
This is why organizations that have created documents around HWP for many years cannot easily change their document environments all at once.
Hancom currently also presents use cases in which the Hangul SDK is embedded in enterprise services to handle HWP and HWPX documents and those services are supplied to public institutions.
Today, People Are Opening Hangul or Word Less Often
Today’s work environment is very different from the past.
In the past, people often opened a word processor such as Hangul or Word on a PC in order to create a document.
Today, content is increasingly written directly within groupware, collaboration tools, business systems, and web services.
Hancom has also provided browser-based document products and various document conversion and viewing technologies. In its 2022 technical materials, Hancom introduced browser-based document products including WebOffice, Web Hangul Drafting, and an integrated document viewer.
In other words, document work is shifting from opening a specific PC program toward the web and business systems.
The globalization of companies is also changing the document environment.
HWP may be familiar when a document is used only within South Korea, but compatibility has to be considered when the same report must be shared with overseas offices, overseas customers, or foreign companies.
If a domestic HWP report and a Word report for overseas sharing are created separately, essentially the same content may have to be managed twice.
For this reason, companies engaged in substantial global collaboration have a growing need to use document formats such as DOCX that can be easily shared with overseas users.
Compared with the past, private companies have less reason to center all document creation around HWP alone.
Yet HWP Support Is Still Needed in South Korean Business Systems
A decline in how often users directly open Hangul does not mean that systems no longer need to handle HWP.
Consider an enterprise BI or reporting system.
It is common for such systems to allow users to download data they have viewed as:
- Excel
However, for systems serving South Korea’s public sector, the ability to handle HWP or HWPX may become an additional requirement.
Hancom’s Hangul SDK also provides functions for creating and editing HWP and HWPX documents in environments where Hangul is not installed, as well as converting them into other document formats such as HTML or PDF. Hancom also presents use cases in which these functions are embedded in a company’s own service or supplied to public institutions.
This point is meaningful when understanding South Korea’s software market.
If a system can reliably handle HWP and HWPX documents in addition to Excel downloads and PDF output, it can be built to accommodate South Korea’s existing document environment and public-sector work processes as well.
For software serving the public sector in particular, this kind of document compatibility can broaden the range of environments in South Korea that the product can support.
Users no longer opening Hangul directly and the technology for handling HWP no longer being necessary are two different things.
HWP Is Not Simply a “South Korean Microsoft Word”
When introducing Hancom to overseas readers, describing HWP simply as “South Korea’s alternative to Microsoft Word” misses an important part of the story.
There is no single reason why HWP was used in South Korea for so long.
A program developed around South Korea’s document environment, and people in schools and workplaces began using it.
Those users learned Hangul’s keyboard shortcuts and document creation methods.
The documents and formats they created continued to accumulate in companies and public institutions.
Those accumulated documents were then connected to other systems such as electronic approval, document management, and work portals.
What began as a single word processor eventually accumulated users, proficiency, documents, formats, and business systems around it.
This is why the history of HWP cannot be explained simply as a feature-by-feature competition between Hangul and Microsoft Word.
DANA NOTES Commentary
The fact that HWP continued to be used in South Korea for so long even after Microsoft Word became a globally dominant document creation program is an important clue to understanding Hancom.
It is difficult to explain this phenomenon simply by assuming that South Korean users repeatedly compared Word and Hangul and then chose Hangul.
One generation did not choose HWP. They learned document creation with HWP.
Just as they opened Excel when they needed to calculate something, they naturally opened Hangul when they needed to create a document.
Over years of use, Hangul’s keyboard shortcuts became second nature, and countless HWP documents and formats were created. The business systems of companies and public institutions were also connected around those documents.
Today, the situation is changing.
As web-based work expands and companies collaborate more globally, people open Hangul or Word directly to create documents less often than they did in the past. Companies that need to share the same documents internationally also have stronger reasons to choose widely compatible document formats.
However, documents and business systems accumulated over decades change more slowly than the programs users directly operate.
For this reason, when considering the meaning of HWP today, it is more accurate to ask a different question than, “Why do South Koreans still use HWP instead of Word?”
“How did a single document program become so deeply embedded in the working habits of users and the business systems of an entire country?”
This is the starting point for understanding the next part of Hancom’s story.
