Microsoft Office Viewers and Converters

Microsoft Office has a considerable market share in North America. Same here in South Korea. So chances are that you won't have to rely on another office suite to do your lesson planning.

Unfortunately this doesn't mean that the version of Office you have on your laptop is going to be the same version that you have at your school. Usually this doesn't matter, but for the heavy PowerPoint 2007 user (like me) who creates on an English machine and presents on a Korean machine, converting is an essential way of life.

Microsoft maintains a collection of converters. The same page also has a collection of viewers which are great in the rare case that you get a computer without Office installed. And the new version of Office has a completely different file format (*.docx, *.xlsx, *.pptx, etc) that is still not as readily accepted as the previous file formats (*.doc, *.xls, *.ppt, etc). For these files, Microsoft provides a converter by way of the Compatibility Pack.

And of course if you don't want to download any software, there's always the converters at Zamzar.

Korean vs. English

I cannot speak Korean.

(And according to the text books that I've seen, I don't speak English all that well either.)

This isn't really a problem at the school where I work since I have a plethora of English teachers who I can magically summon by walking aimless down the hall. But on the odd occasion when I need to talk one of the school staff and my support team is busy with their students or their smokes, I'm in a bit of a bind.

Fortunately there is Google translate and the other language tools on the Internet. Some are viable alternatives to Google and others not so much, but I have a funny feeling that all translation sites use more or less the same engine, much life duff beer, since the translations from English to Korean and vice versa are all far from perfect.

So the only real difference is in the packaging and in the end I usually use Google since it has the direct Korean to English and English to Korean links, the browser button feature, and of course the trademarked minimalistic interface.

For the Korean speaker there's the dictionary at naver.com and if you have the Haansoft's Hangul, you should have an English to Korean dictionary, 한컴 사전, installed.

*.hwp files

These files are document files created by the Korean equivalent to Microsoft Word, Hangul Word Processor by Haansoft. For non-Koreans, there's a bunch of information already on the web, including this English translation of the corporate and product page, some information about the history of Hangul and entry on Wikipedia that mentions:

To open HWP files in a non-Korean Windows system, users can download and execute a conversion program [1], which enables files to be opened with Microsoft Word. This program, however, can only be used with files created with Microsoft Word 2000 and below. Haansoft has also a Hangul document viewer program freely available on its website called "Hangul Viewer 2005" (한/글 뷰어 2005) [2].

The information on the wiki is a bit outdated since navigating the Haansoft website reveals a 2007 viewer and another search reveals updated information regarding Microsoft Office 2007. And if you're dealing with this file, then you are probably doing so because of school; most schools have a site license for Hangul so installing the application could be as easy as a short call to the school's IT department.