To get office work done on an iPad, you need an app (or set of apps) that lets you access your preferred storage system, create new documents, and edit existing ones. The three-in-one productivity app Polaris Office 5 ($12.99) for iPad gives you the tools you need to do moderately complex document editing, without eating up a lot of space. Polaris lets you connect to several major storage services, including Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive, but it also lets you save the files locally. The $12.99 price lets you download Polaris Office 5 onto all your iOS devices (iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch), but don't confuse it with the free Polaris Office app (no "5" in the name). Allow me to explain.

The paid iPad app (Polaris Office 5) costs a one-time fee. (On some Android devices, it comes preinstalled at no extra cost.) You buy it once, and you can install it on all your iOS devices. You can upload and download files from a connected cloud storage services, or save new files you create locally on your iPad in the app. The free app (Polaris Office), on the other hand, lets you download files from the cloud, but not upload them. You're also limited to using it on only two devices. When you get the free app, you'll have to sign up for a free account, and you'll have the option to upgrade to a Premium subscription for $3.99 per month or $39.99 per year and comes with a few other perks. It's a bit confusing.

In any event, the $12.99 app was a great value two years ago before other big players got into the mobile office market. Now, with apps such as Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides being free, Polaris Office 5 isn't as sweet a deal.

Price

Polaris Office costs $12.99, which was a steal two years ago before some of the bigger players in the space released their apps. Now, with several free apps, 13 bucks sounds like a lot. Who knows if you'll pay full price, though, as Polaris Office has been on sale for months for just $1.99. Google's apps (Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides) are all free, including Quickoffice, which it acquired a while back and which formerly sold for close to $20. Microsoft's apps are free to download, but they require an Office 365 account if you want to create or edit files, which is likely to run you $99 a year. Apple's Pages, Numbers, and Keynote cost $9.99 each, unless you purchased an iPad recently (any time since October 2013), in which case they're free. It's all pretty confusing.

Getting to Work

Polaris Office 5 lets you create and edit the following file formats: .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, .pptx, and .txt. You can view, but not edit, PDFs and .hwp (used in Korea) files. As mentioned, Polaris Office 5 lets you save documents locally in the app or to a cloud-based storage service, which is extremely convenient.

The interface is fairly intuitive and minimal. Three sample documents, or guides, show up in the app when you first install it. These documents cover the finer points of using the Polaris Office 5 iPad app for creating and editing word processing files, slideshows, and spreadsheets. 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 iPad generally is to press and hold the screen until the text is highlighted and spanner bars appear, which you can drag to adjust how much text you want to select. Polaris Office 5 instead has you double tap and then move the spanner bars. Moreover, I found the spanner bars to be extremely finicky, flickering and not always highlighting all the text I wanted.