Polaris Office (for iPhone)

Office documents are rarely as accessible as they should be. On a tablet or smartphone, and namely iPad and iPhone, plenty of apps give you some access and interaction with the files you need to stay productive, but it's limited unless you buy Apple's dedicated office apps Pages, Numbers, and Keynote (for word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, respectively).

The productivity app Polaris Office ($12.99) for both iPhone and iPad radically changes the office landscape. It's an alternative to Apple's iWork suite for editing documents, creating new ones, and saving them either to the Polaris Office app or into popular cloud-based storage services, such as Dropbox and Google Drive (formerly Google Docs).

Polaris Office's price is even more competitive than it may first sound. Buying the $12.99 app lets you install both the iPad and iPhone versions, and they include three productivity categories (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations) in one tight bundle. A similar app called Quickoffice Pro HD (recently? acquired by Google) costs $19.99 and only installs on iPads. Apple sells its Pages, Numbers, and Keynote separately for $9.99 a pop.

For its solid functionality at a great price, Polaris Office is an Editors' Choice among productivity apps for the iPad.

Supported File Types and Services
Polaris Office supports.doc and .docx word documents, .xls and .xlsx spreadsheets, .ppt and .pptx presentations, .txt documents and PDFs.

You can connect your Polaris Office app to a solid, but not comprehensive, selection of popular cloud-based services: Google Docs, Dropbox, Box, and WebDAV services. The comparable app Quickoffice has a few additional services, such as SugarSync, Evernote, and Catch?I'd love to see Polaris Office adopt a few more services to its list, too. In any event, integrating with a cloud-based storage solution lets you bypass iCloud in some sense, as you can use the other service to sync the files you create on your iOS devices. You can start a document on your iPhone, save it to Dropbox, and edit it tomorrow using Polaris Office on your iPad. Or you could open it on a Windows or Mac computer in another program of your choice.

Interface and Usability
An intuitive interface helps boost how productive you can be with Polaris Office. There's little to learn that isn't explicit from the button names, simple instructions, and interface design. Sample documents, one of each of the three main varieties, come preloaded in the app. Their contents contain instructions for using the app and its features, so be sure to read and explore them.

A few unconventional controls, however, take some getting used to. For example, the convention for selecting text on an iPhone or iPad is to press and hold the screen until the text is highlighted and spanner bar controls appear, which you can drag to adjust how much text you need to select. Polaris Office has you double tap to select text instead, which any seasoned iOS user would simply never try off the cuff. It's an instruction you have to read to know.

Another example of unconventional controls: When scrolling on most iOS apps, you can swipe up and kind of flick the page to make it continue scrolling even after you release your finger (until it slows down and stops or you touch the screen again to regain control). Polaris Office uses this motion when you look through lists of files to open, but the motion is a little different once you open a document. Inside a document, you can scroll with a flick, but only if you touch the margins, which is difficult to do on an iPhone unless you zoom way out. Even then, the motion is "stickier" and the pages flow at a pace that's different from what you see in other apps. This difference isn't a show stopper, but it was noticeable.

Getting to Work
You can edit your office files in Polaris Office, with some basic limitations?but even these constraints are on par with what you might find in Google Docs or even Microsoft's free Web app versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (they're wrapped into the online and cloud service call SkyDrive. For example, you can't track changes or enable macros, but that's not possible in Google Docs or SkyDrive either.

The tools easily cover the basics and then some. You can format text, insert images, save files as different file types (export to PDF, for example), change the page layout, alter the type of cell in spreadsheets, look up formulas, sort, play a presentation, and much more.

When testing the app on a speedy iPhone 5 with a Wi-Fi connection, documents loaded extremely quickly. You can open any file in a near-full screen mode, collapsing the top toolbar. In landscape mode, the toolbar disappears permanently.

Another minor damper on the productivity party was that when I searched for a document that was in my connected Google Drive account, Polaris Office couldn't find it. I later realized that you have to search each of your connected storage spaces separately, so the first search bar I encountered was only for documents created and saved in Polaris Office. When you first open a connected storage are, such as Google Docs, you won't see a search bar at first glance. But it appears when you pull down the page?it's just kind of hidden and tucked away at the top.

Polaris Office for Productivity
Polaris Office couldn't be a better deal. For just a few dollars more than what it would cost you to buy one of Apple's office apps, you can get three, all rolled into one tight productivity machine. Plus, Polaris Office works on both iPhone and iPad, which is like getting another two-for-one deal, with no subscriptions or add-on fees. I should hope future updates will smooth out the few unconventional controls, and maybe add a couple of more services to the storage options, but nevertheless, it's a great app that easily is a PCMag Editors' Choice.

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