App of the week: Polaris Office

Welcome back to our weekly spotlight on helpful apps. We focus on a variety of products that are useful for work, personal use, or both, providing our own thoughts on the apps and what you can do with them. This week we create easy documents with Polaris Office.

An intro to Polaris Office
Back when we started this weekly feature, I reviewed Pages, which integrates beautifully with iCloud services. I’ve since discovered an alternative app that offers its own cloud storage and supports Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, as well as Adobe PDFs. It’s available on PC, Mac, iOS and Android.

The free version of Polaris Office is a great alternative to Pages for those looking to save some money – for instance a VA just getting started and in need of a quick solution. This gives you 15GB of cloud storage and the ability to connect up to three devices to the account. For a meagre £3 a month you can go for 100GB of storage and support for nine devices, or for £5 go pro with 15 devices and 1TB of storage. If you’re really serious about using Polaris Office for your business, subscriptions for multiple users start from £6 a month.

Our review
Polaris Office couldn’t be any easier to use. I tried it out by typing out some notes on my phone and found it much simpler to edit the format of the text than I did in Pages. One really cool feature is the ability to draw or scribble with your finger directly onto a Word document – possibly more handy if you have a stylus for your touch screen or simply need to doodle to occupy your time.

Switch to a spreadsheet and the ease of use continues. I can see where this could come in handy if you have a tablet with a keyboard, as it’s a great way to collate data on the move, such as expense reports or contact records. When you share your documents with other users, they can make changes and leave comments for collaborative editing.

And the best part? The app is quite small in size, so it doesn’t take up a lot of space on your device.

The verdict
This is a great piece of kit for teams or small business owners. With a simple, easy-to-navigate design and a small price tag it makes for the perfect alternative to more expensive programmes.

Find out more and download Polaris Office at polarisoffice.com