BatiOffice
One free desktop app for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, HWP, and PDF — with AI editing that reaches the format Korean offices actually use.
Working in Korea means HWP. Public-sector forms, university paperwork, and a great deal
of corporate correspondence arrive as .hwp, and every cross-platform office tool treats
it as somebody else’s problem — so the workflow becomes a licensed copy of one suite for
HWP, another for everything else, and a converter in between that ruins the layout.
BatiOffice is a desktop app that opens Word, Excel, PowerPoint, HWP, and PDF in one place, on macOS and Windows, with AI editing across all of them. Opening, editing, and saving local files is free — no account, no subscription, no cap on how many documents you touch.
What it does
- HWP alongside the Microsoft formats, which is the reason to look at it at all. One app for the document a ministry sent you and the deck you’re building from it.
- PowerPoint editing down to structure, text, images, shapes, and themes, saving back
to
.pptx. - PDF editing — text and images, annotations, and page insert, delete, rotate, and reorder — rather than a viewer that makes you export somewhere else.
- AI editing inside the document, not in a separate chat window.
Bring your own key
The AI features use your own API key. You paste in a key from a provider you already pay — OpenAI, Anthropic, or another — and BatiOffice stores it encrypted in the operating system’s keychain.
That model has a real advantage and one thing to check. The advantage: no per-seat AI
subscription, and requests are billed and governed under an agreement you already hold.
The thing to check: your document text still travels to that provider when you invoke
an AI feature. Local editing is local; a prompt is not. For a sensitive .hwp from a
client, decide deliberately which parts you send.
The same company also offers Excel-focused AI — using a model as a spreadsheet function, and web-based automation for repetitive sheet work — which is worth a look if the repetitive part of your week lives in Excel.
Choosing between the office tools here
| Situation | Pick |
|---|---|
| HWP is unavoidable | BatiOffice |
| Open source, and Linux is in the mix | GenOffice |
| Everyone edits the same file at once | Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 |
| The document is really a document you’d rather diff | Markdown in Git |
For a Korean workplace the choice is often not either-or: a free suite that handles HWP locally removes the second licence and the converter, and that is the whole pitch.
A note on documents you didn’t write
Whichever suite you use, a file from outside is untrusted input — macros, embedded objects, and links included. Open unexpected attachments with the same caution you’d apply anywhere else, and don’t let a document convince an AI assistant to act on instructions buried in its text.
Next
Everything so far builds the thing. One category left, on putting it online → Vibe Coding Infra
Last updated 25 Aug 2026, 00:00 UTC.