Why I made
IeumOffice

I teach Korean at a high school. I am far from a programmer: I once took a few coding courses on HTML, CSS and JavaScript and gave up partway. So when someone like me makes an office program, people often ask why. Here is my answer.

The old man who carved a paddle

I love the story "The Old Man Who Carved a Paddle." In an age when every step is done by machine, the old man thinks of the person who will hold the paddle, carves it with his worn hands, looks at it, and carves it again. I want to learn that craftsman's heart, and the feel for the work that words cannot fully capture. I think the learning I share with my students every day should be like that too.

So I am not very interested in bringing technology into education for its own sake. What I wonder about is how the "I" who lives tangled up with the world should respond to that world in the age of AI, and how my students and I can go through that together in a Korean class. When I am asked to give talks on AI and education, I turn down talks on vibe coding or how to use AI, and I gladly go where teachers and students talk together about using AI critically.

On "one click"

I don't think AI is bad. But I find it hard to agree with the idea of finishing a job with AI in "one click." I don't think a world where many people do less work with "one click" and make money with "one click" is a good world. I hope people use AI knowing that they are connected to the world, to do better the work that only they can do there. With that in mind, you can use AI with a craftsman's heart too.

So I don't think less

Before I make anything, I draw a mind map. Before I hand work to AI, I write down what I want to do, what I know and what I don't, and make my thinking concrete first. Until now I sorted out my thoughts in a mind map tool like XMind, moved that into an AI tool, and then moved what the AI made back into Hangul or PowerPoint. All that moving was such a hassle that, before I knew it, I kept skipping the step of sorting out my thoughts in a mind map.

I felt this had to stop. So I gathered the tools I use most for reading and writing into one window. I open mind maps, Hangul, Word, PowerPoint and PDF in one place, and when I need to, I hand work to the AI beside them. What I made that way is IeumOffice.

To fix what AI makes with my own hands

Hand an AI a textbook file and ask it for a nice-looking activity sheet in HTML, and with "one click" an activity sheet comes out. It looks convincing, but it falls short in many ways for real use with the students I teach. The AI doesn't know our school, our classroom or those students.

The problem is that what comes out is hard to fix yourself. There are ways, but for most teachers they are hard and tedious. In IeumOffice you can open the HTML activity sheet the AI made and fix it with your own hands.

Alongside the office programs you have

Some people see IeumOffice as a replacement for MS Office or Hancom Office. That is not what I made it for. As I wrote above, it started because sorting out my thoughts, going back and forth with AI and fixing the results were scattered across many programs, and I wanted to connect them.

I still use MS Office and Hancom Office alongside IeumOffice. Over the years I have been able to get a lot of work done thanks to these programs. I am grateful to the people who have built and refined them for so long.

Built on open source

Many people have kindly worried about copyright. IeumOffice was not made with REA (Reverse Engineer Anything), which is popular these days. It is built on trustworthy open source such as GenOffice and rhwp. Without the time and effort that went into these projects, IeumOffice could not exist. That is why I also released IeumOffice as open source that anyone can use for free, for the public good. I thank the people who run open-source projects, and I will carry this on carefully so that I do not bring harm to that community.

What I want to connect next

Still, I have a worry. I worry that many people will be drawn only to documents appearing in "one click" and use it only that way. In future updates I will not stop at connecting documents and AI. I will grow it into a tool that connects documents (work) with documents (work), people with documents, and, further, people with the world.

Thank you

On the morning of October 22, 2026, total downloads stood at 700. A day later they were 3,869. When I planned this project, my final goal was 3,000, and it passed that within days of release. I am still stunned. Thank you to everyone who took an interest.

Written like this, it sounds like a great program, but if you use it you will find it is still full of bugs. I would be grateful for your continued support and for any good feedback you send.