Apple Pages vs Polaris Office - Your thoughts ?

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seanudal Author

Level 1

9 points

Apple Pages vs Polaris Office - Your thoughts ?

Hi,

I have used Pages extensively to create documents and teach adults and children how to use the app.

Yesterday I bought Polaris Office and was very impressed with the Word Processor.

1. Polaris Office displayed my Word Documents perfectly unlike Pages which changes the layout and fonts.

2. Polaris file Managment is far superior to Pages with links to Google Docs, Dropbox and WebDAV.

3. Tables in Polaris are way better. Inserting a new table feels more like Word. You can change the border cell colour which is not possible with Pages.

4. The Polaris interface is clean and easy to use. I dislike Pages forcing you to view the entire page all the time. Polaris Office allows you to zoom out to see the document outline.

5. Polaris Office has a lot more Shapes and they look like Microsoft Word smartshape icons.

6. Polaris Office does not support transparent shapes which is a pity, as this is very effective in Pages.

7. Polaris Office allows you to edit image brightness and contrast which is great, but does not have a mask feature like Pages.

8. The page layout features in Polaris are great. Changing Margins is easy.

9. Polaris Office allows you to insert an image into a table. Pages only allows you to switch off Word Wrap, and then position the image over the table.

10. Polaris Office allows you to highlight text. This is not possible in Pages.

I would love to know what other iPad users think of Polaris Office. I think it is way better than QuickOffice and Office HD.

I think it has features that are better than Pages and I will start using this app instead of Pages.

Apple needs competition as Pages feature updates are slow, with a buggy iCloud file Managment system.

It will be fantastic when Microsoft joins the iPad Office list, however Polaris is really good competition for now.

Sean

iPad Wi-Fi + 4G, iOS 5.1

Posted on Sep 29, 2012 2:58 PM

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Answer 1

Dec 16, 2012 8:10 AM in response to seanudal

I had a very different experience with Polaris Office.

1. Polaris Office displayed my Word Documents perfectly unlike Pages which changes the layout and fonts.

Not a single font was displayed correctly. Of all the fonts listed in the app, only Times New Roman and Courier (but strangely not Courier New) rendered somewhat correctly. Times New Roman did not look like Times New Roman exactly -- something was always a little off -- it did not display curly quotes and the italics were wrong. As an academic that depends on serif fonts such as Times New Roman, this is unacceptable.

2. Polaris file Managment is far superior to Pages with links to Google Docs, Dropbox and WebDAV.

I'm not sure if I would call this File Management so much as "Cloud Access". Sure, you can access more cloud services but who cares when your documents look like garbage (except for formatting, which was, for the most part accurate) and the file management system is like navagating a bouncy house.

3. Tables in Polaris are way better. Inserting a new table feels more like Word. You can change the border cell colour which is not possible with Pages.

Agreed. Except when your fonts look like garbage, its pretty hard to spend time writing in the app. And I could care less about tables when the whole point of a Word Processor is to, well, Process Words.

4. The Polaris interface is clean and easy to use. I dislike Pages forcing you to view the entire page all the time. Polaris Office allows you to zoom out to see the document outline.

Fair enough. It looks good.

5. Polaris Office has a lot more Shapes and they look like Microsoft Word smartshape icons.

Granted.

8. The page layout features in Polaris are great. Changing Margins is easy.

Also a point in Polaris' favor.

9. Polaris Office allows you to insert an image into a table. Pages only allows you to switch off Word Wrap, and then position the image over the table.

Check.

10. Polaris Office allows you to highlight text. This is not possible in Pages.

I don't see why anyone should care about this, but sure.

All in all, i think it has potential but that's simply not good enough. I'll stick with QuickOffice and Pages. (QuickOffice, especially, for those few times when I have to include images in my documents -- those images never show up in Pages unless the images themselves are copied over the iPad separately). Really, I don't know why its so hard to make a word processor for iPad.

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